


The Endemic

by Derin



Series: Parting the Clouds [14]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-26 10:12:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 30,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5000791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Derin/pseuds/Derin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cassie and Rachel get the shock of their lives when they... the toilet one. This is the Andalite toilet book.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to JustAnotherGhostwriter, who has generously loaned her awesome betaing skills and general support to this project from start to finish and without whom this would almost certainly not exist (and would certainly be much worse), and Pawnofanellimist, as well as my innumerable temporary beta readers. Also thanks to Featherquillpen, who came up with the series title.
> 
> My apologies that this is late. Also, I'm looking for more beta readers. If you like reading poorly-scribbled fanfic and making it better in your free time, hit me up.

My name is Cassie. And I fight aliens.

As I’m sure you can imagine, this creates a lot of problems and questions. Every time I was sure I’d wrapped my mind around some new information, yet more of it sprang out of nowhere, often trying to kill or enslave us. I’d pretty much accepted the concept of aliens existing in the first place (and trying to kill or enslave us), sort-of puzzled out the incredibly powerful spacetime-bending conservationist (who’d insisted that without his help the other aliens would manage to enslave us), and moved on to a puzzle that, according to our resident alien teammate, shouldn’t exist.

And that’s why my pocket was full of somewhat confused notes about Tobias when I was out checking the health of our horse. I’d brought them out to bury in my little box under the tree.

After showing up as a human to Rachel’s award ceremony, Tobias had taken us aside and told us what had happened in that distant, explaining-the-bare-minimum way of his. We’d all sort of assumed that the ellimist had come through on his promise. He hadn’t, except in the most roundabout possible way – he’d given Tobias his ‘humanity’ back in the sense that he’d taken him, a now morph-capable bird, a little way back in time to acquire his own DNA. Which sounded pretty cool, except for the part where he was still a bird. Oh, he could choose to be human again – he could focus on his human form and hold it for two hours, trapping himself a second time and knowing that the decision was permanent. He could trade in his usefulness as a soldier in this war for a pair of hands and a warm meal every night, if he truly wanted to be human that badly. His humanity was right there, well within reach, just on the other side of a life of shapeshifting and super-healing that happened to have a side order of living in the forest and eating rats.

The notes in my pocket had several choice things to say about the ellimist’s personality and brand of ‘help’.

But that was Tobias’ problem, and there wasn’t much we could do to help him. I had other problems of my own. Human problems.

“So, can we talk?” I asked Rachel, peering up from between Midnight's legs. The horse had managed to cut herself on a piece of fence wire. Not badly, but I had to monitor it and make sure it didn't get infected.

“About what? Tobias?”

“No,” I said. “About your dad.” _About what I did. About why you're mad at me_. _And why you don’t want to tell anyone else, so you’re here pretending to hang out with me, pretending everything’s okay._

“Do we have to?” Rachel asked tightly.

“Well, we have to eventually.”

“No we don't.”

“Look, I get why you're mad at me. And you're right. But I don't know how to make this better. And I hate having you mad at me.”

“Do you think I _want_ to be mad at you, Cassie? I hate feeling like I can't trust you. I hate feeling like you would do something like that to me. We've always... even before this alien thing, we were best friends. We had each other. And since this war started, I've needed you more than ever, and then you...” She shook her head. “No, I'm just going to pretend it never happened. That's my decision. I'm going to forget the whole thing.”

“We can't just ignore it.”

“Why not? Like you said, we can't fix it. There's no way to make it better. My dad's out of town; he's not in danger. I can't tell him who I am, so it's not like him knowing about the war is information I can use. And I believe – I choose to believe – that if he was in danger, you'd tell me. So, yeah. Forgive and forget. Move on. That seems the best thing to do.” She crouched down next to me – not getting any dirt on her jeans as she did so, I noticed. “How's the horse?”

I bit my lip. I knew it wasn’t as simple as just forgetting something like that had happened… as just forgetting that I’d done something like that. You couldn’t push the reset button on trust, or on feelings of betrayal. But I also knew that if Rachel was going to try, there wasn’t a thing in the world that I could do to stop her. Trying to force the issue into the spotlight would be like getting between her in grizzly bear morph and an intended target – dangerous, pointless, and causing a lot of unnecessary pain. She wanted to talk about the horse instead? Fine. I’d play along and let her sort it out. “The horse is fine. The cut's healing well.” I stood up and gave Midnight a quick pat. “Let me make a quick detour, then we should get back to the barn. I gotta feed the animals.”

Rachel watched silently as I dug up and buried my notes. Technically, I hadn’t told her I had a box of notes hidden out in the woods, but I hadn’t made a secret of my various forms of research either. She’d even helped me with some of it, as my only thoughtspeak-distance research subject apart from Jake who neither openly told me that what I was doing was pointless nor needed to be bribed with pie. She didn’t ask what was on the pages I added to the box, or comment as I heaped old leaves on top of the burial site and stomped them down.

“Right,” I said, dusting my hands on my jeans, “let’s get back.”

Rachel stared at my legs as we walked. “Cassie?”

“Hmm?”

“How long ago did you buy those jeans? When you were four?”

With my back to Rachel and my face safely hidden, I grinned. It was an old argument. A safe argument. Rachel couldn't stand the fact that my jeans ended an inch or so above my boots.

“Are you saying that these jeans are too short?” I asked.

“Not if you're expecting a flood. If you were expecting a flood, those would be the exact jeans to wear. They're so short you could wade across the Mississippi and not get them wet.”

“They're not that bad,” I grumbled.

“Let me take you to the mall,” she said, in the manner of one who'd made the same plea countless times over many years. “We can get you some new jeans. They don't have to be fancy ones. Maybe a nice belt, too.”

“Who's going to the mall?” my dad asked, not looking up from the little log book he was writing in. We'd reached the barn.

“Rachel is going to the mall,” I said.

“Make her go with me,” Rachel pleaded.

“Can't,” Dad laughed. “I need Cassie. Crazy Helen called and we have a sick horse way on the edge of the Dry Lands.”

“The Dry Lands?” I moaned. “Really?” The Dry Lands were out on the edge of town, and by 'out on the edge of town' I mean they made our farm bordering the forest look like the heart of Suburbia. It would take a good two hours to drive out there, and since the government didn't seem to care about animal health at all, that was somehow my dad's problem instead of the job of a more appropriately placed agency. Not that the drive bothered me as much as it would have before the whole Animorph thing. Routinely spending half a day hiking through the forest as a wolf had kind of put nice, quick car travel into perspective. I shot Rachel a sly look. “Oh, dear me. I guess I can't watch you power shop for three hours while guys drool all over you. How terrible. Life is so cruel.”

Rachel forced a laugh. “I guess a sick horse _is_ more important than jeans that go all the way down. But there won't always be sick animals to save you.”

“Come with us,” I pleaded. I like spending time with my dad. But two hours with only my dad's awkward questions about school and the greatest hits of Stevie Wonder was a bit much. Especially since I was still far from certain that he was himself. He might have an alien in his brain.

“Yeah, right,” Rachel said.

“Come with us,” I repeated, “and I'll let you pick out a new pair of jeans for me tomorrow.”

That got her attention. Rachel's eyes locked onto me like she was a bald eagle and had just spotted a Dracon beam. “Real jeans? Not some pair of blue cardboard-looking jeans?” She looked thoughtful. “Of course, you'll need a nice top to go with them.”

If she wasn't my best friend who I was desperately trying to repair bridges with after pulling her father into an intergalactic war, I probably would have stood up for myself. Instead, like an idiot, I said nothing, and just climbed into the truck.

But that wasn't the most idiotic thing about the trip. I'd been worried that such a long journey with my possibly-Controller father would be awkward. A long journey between my possibly-Controller father and a violent-minded Animorph who was still kind of mad at me for putting hers at risk? SUPER awkward.

Turns out the greatest hits of Stevie Wonder is of limited use in defusing an awkward silence.

So I guess it's kind of fortunate that the whole situation was overshadowed by our discovery of the evil horses that threatened all of humanity.


	2. Chapter 2

It was dark by the time we got out into the Dry Lands.

Not quite desert and not quite scrubland, the Dry Lands can best be described as a whole lot of nothing. There's scruffy grass, and wildflowers, and boulders that jut out of the ground at odd angles, and the occasional tree, but it's mostly wasteland that stretches on for miles. Not that we could see much of it in the dark, especially since the journey was almost entirely by highway.

“So,” Rachel said after an eternity of Stevie Wonder, “who's Crazy Helen?”

“Probably shouldn't call her that,” my dad said, “even though she calls herself that. She's an old woman, perhaps eighty years old. Has a trailer and an old souvenir shop out here. I met her years ago, when there was a problem with the Dry Land horse herds.”

“Intestinal parasites,” I explained. “Worms.”

“For who? The horses or Crazy Helen?”

“Here we are,” Dad announced, interrupting my search for a really funny comeback for Rachel. He pulled over under a billboard that read LAST CHANCE SOUVENIRS. I'd often wondered how many souvenirs Crazy Helen actually managed to sell. It seemed impolite to ask.

The billboard was larger than the actual store, which looked like it had been closed for years – half-boarded windows, peeling paint. Behind the store was a silver, bullet-shaped trailer, where Crazy Helen actually lived. It wasn't hard to see the door. It was under the awning strung with Christmas lights. Even though it was nowhere near Christmas.

Crazy Helen came out when she saw us pull up. She squinted her wrinked baby-blue eyes against the glare of the setting sun and pushed a strand of stringy gray hair back behind her ear to join what could charitably be considered a messy bun. She was wearing a faded flowery blouse over patched jeans that ended about an inch above the top of her worn cowboy boots.

"Hey," Rachel said. "It’s _you,_ Cassie. In sixty or seventy years."

I managed to maneuvre my elbow to accidentally dig into Rachel's side, and she chuckled.

"Actually, Cassie, you’ll end up running some big volunteer organization that saves unhappy chickens and whales or whatever," Rachel said, softening her sarcasm. Making an effort to be nice.

I kind of liked that picture of my future. Although I wasn’t sure how I was going to work with chickens and whales at the same time. Besides, things would be different after the war. Sure, I'd fantasised about using morphing to help endangered species or abused animals or whatever, really getting into their heads and scouting out potential territories as those animals to see if they were suitable, that sort of thing. But, well... how much of the planet was left to save depended a lot on us six kids. And on how soon the andalites arrived. We couldn't hold the lines forever.

It was good that Rachel was confident, though. Somebody had to be.

"She’s over there. Over _there,"_ Crazy Helen yelled as soon as we piled out of the truck. "It’s a big roan mare. She’s acting all funny. Like maybe she’s been eating the loco weed."

"Loco weed?" Rachel asked me.

I shrugged.

"Hi, Helen," my dad said calmly. "We’ll go take a look, see what we have. How have you been?"

"Those darn aliens still won’t let me sleep," she said.

I saw Rachel stiffen. I gave her a wink. In a low whisper I said, "Different aliens."

"They keep sending me the messages through my teeth," Helen said. "They keep on telling me they’re gonna land, right out here. But I haven’t seen a Martian land in forty years. Very untrustworthy. Very, very sneaky, untrustworthy folks."

"Who?" my father asked.

"The Martians, that’s who." Crazy Helen laughed. It wasn’t an insane laugh. More of a gentle, knowing sound. I wondered sometimes if Crazy Helen was really crazy, or just playing a game.

Sometimes I wondered if she did believe in the Martians, but played a game anyway, because a little 'just-kidding' laugh at the right moment could make all the difference when you were talking to other people. Just because Crazy Helen was crazy didn't mean that she was stupid.

"Well, we’ll go look at this horse," my dad said.

Rachel and I shone flashlights into the dark. The moon was up, but it was just a sliver and didn’t cast much light. And soon we were beyond the pool of light from the trailer and the billboard. Out in the absolute blackness you get when you’re far from the city.

The flashlight picked out stumpy trees and bushes and rocks. The only sound was the rustling of the tall grass as we walked. My father and I peered deep into the gloom, looking for a horse. Rachel, on the other hand, turned to look back toward the highway.

"Hey. Is that the horse you’re looking for?" Rachel asked.

"Where?"

"There. Back by the road. Back by that pay phone."

My dad and I turned back to look. A scruffy roan horse was swaying from side to side as it walked. Swaying like a drunk.

As we watched, the horse seemed to be attracted to the telephone. It picked up the receiver with its mouth and let it hang off the hook.

And that’s when things got strange. The horse lowered its head to the ground, picked up a twig in its lips, and seemed to be poking the telephone keyboard.

"Am I crazy, or is that horse trying to make a phone call?" Rachel said.

My dad shrugged. "Must be disoriented. Doesn’t know what it’s doing. Come on, let’s get over there."

I dropped behind a few steps to fall in with Rachel.

"That horse is dialling the phone," Rachel said in a whisper.

"Sure looks like it," I agreed.

"Ordering a pizza?" Rachel suggested.

"Hay, alfalfa, and extra cheese?"

They say that one of the biggest barriers between the human mind and reality is the tendency to filter. There's a whole chapter of cognitive biases that basically amounts to filtering for different reasons. We ignore or rationalise away what can't be true, what we don't want to be true, or what we can't understand well enough to accept is true. Well, being an Animorph has done wonders for our tendency to filter out stuff. A horse making a phone call? We could see it happening, so it was happening. We'd seen weirder.

My dad was getting close to the horse. The horse spotted him, and hesitated, like it wanted to complete its phone call. But it also wanted to run away. It decided to run. Only it wasn’t really up for running. The best it could do was wobble off into the darkness, practically falling over as it went.

"Whoa, girl, whoa," my dad said in his calming-the-animals voice. "Whoa. I’m just trying to help you."

But the horse wasn’t interested. It swayed and wobbled and drifted away as fast as it could. I lost it in the darkness, but then we heard a WHUMPF sound.

I broke into a run and soon caught up to my father. He was kneeling over the fallen horse. The horse was still trying to stand up, but it was out of it.

"What do you think it is?" I asked my dad anxiously. The horse was sweating profusely. It glared at us with huge brown eyes.

"Well, it could be a lot of things," he answered. "But I’d put my money on snake bite. Try and keep her calm. I have to get some things from the truck. I’ll be right back."

"Snakes?" Rachel said.

"Sure. There are lots of snakes out here," I said. I patted the horse’s flank and made soothing noises.

"Not at night, though, right? I mean, snakes are probably a daytime thing... right?"

"Not always."

"Great. This is much better than the mall. Poison snakes and phonecalling horses."

“Yep,” I agreed. “Definitely better than the mall.” I noticed something happening to the horse’s head. “Hey. Look at that.”

There, crawling its way out of the horse’s left ear, was a slug. A large gray slug.

"Is that what I think it is?" Rachel whispered.

"Yeah. I think so." See? Any normal person would be really confused right about then, trying to figure out what trick of the light could cause such a thing. While I held the horse's head, Rachel angled her torch to give us a better look.

The gray slug wormed its way out of the horse’s head. It plopped heavily on the gravel and grass beneath it. And then it started to writhe away.

I’d seen those slugs before. We both had.

"Yeerk," I whispered. "There was a yeerk in this horse."

The yeerk started to crawl away into the darkness. Rachel quickly scrambled up and lifted one foot.

“No!” I cried.

She frowned at me. “What?”

“You can't kill it.”

“Uh, Cassie? It's a yeerk.”

“It doesn't have a host.”

“So killing them when we have to go through an innocent slave is okay, but if there are no innocents sacrificed, it's wrong?”

“It's never okay to just kill something. It's just sometimes necessary. But this time...”

“I guess you're right, Cassie. I guess we could let it crawl off and starve to death. I wonder which will get it first; dehydration, Kandrona starvation, or some predator? For its sake, I hope the predator.”

I sighed and looked away. “Okay. Good point.”

But I still couldn't bring myself to watch her do it.

I glanced back and saw my dad still digging through his medical supplies at the truck. And that’s when the pale stallion appeared.

He was not a terribly large horse, but he carried himself with an aura of power. Horses are pretty strong when they want to be, and this one knew it. He didn’t move like a horse. He moved like somebody piloting a four-wheel drive through a city. He stepped calmly toward us, head held high. He looked down at the snake-bit horse. He looked at us. I hadn't seen how Rachel had gotten rid of the yeerk, but it wasn't in sight. I tried my best to look like an innocent vet's assistant helping a stricken horse.

“It's gonna be ok, girl,” I murmured, stroking the mare's neck and doing my best to ignore the stallion. “You're gonna be ok.”

The stallion turned and ran away.

"Rachel?"

"Yeah."

"We have to get out of here."

"What do you mean? Why?"

"Because that Controller just looked at us and then ran off in a big hurry. Run! RUN!" I grabbed Rachel’s arm and yanked her along with me. We took about eight steps, then...

TSSEEEEEWWW! TSSEEEEEWWW!

A blinding light! Brilliant and intense as a flashbulb-in-your-face light! The light was coming from above. From the sky.

The very rocks split open. The ground itself seemed to explode.

My face hit the dirt before I even knew I was falling.


	3. Chapter 3

I was on my back. I was indoors. I opened my eyes. Staring down at me was an alien. A pale, ghostly oval face with two enormous eyes. It looked like a little kid, with weak arms and legs.

It looked like one of the aliens from that old movie, _Close Encounters of the Third Kind._ In fact, it looked _exactly_ like one of them.

I blinked and looked again. It was a life-size cardboard cutout. Standing just behind the alien was Data from _Star Trek: The Next Generation._

I sat up. All around me were shelves piled with _Star Wars_ masks. Wookiees and Darth Vader and Imperial stormtroopers, along with _Star Trek_ handheld phasers and Spock ears, and a dozen other things I'd never have recognised without listening to months of Jake and Marco desperately try to avoid thinking about whatever suicidal mission we were on at the time. There were posters everywhere. Most of those I didn't recognise, except for Mulder and Scully from _X-Files._ But mostly there were posters, mugs, ashtrays, pencils, and T-shirts, all emblazoned with a red-and-white logo dominated by the stencil letters spelling 'Zone: 91.'

"She’s awake," Rachel said. She sauntered over, carrying a short stick in one hand.

"What’s going on?" I asked her.

"You were knocked out. You know, when that totally unexplainable explosion happened." She arched one brow and gave me a meaningful look.

I gave her a short not to indicate I understood, and then immediately regretted it, because moving my head hurt. My father came rushing over, followed by Crazy Helen. He knelt and began feeling my head.

"Ow!"

"Looks okay," he muttered. "Superficial cut. Serious bruise, but I doubt there’s a concussion. Still, I’ll take you by the hospital emergency room on the way home. Have the doctors there check you out."

“Why did you let me sleep if you suspected concussion?” I muttered moodily.

“You were already out,” he replied, chewing his lip worriedly. I could see that the experience had been somewhat of a shock for him. He'd expected a routine trip through a semi-abandoned area to deal with a normal problem, not life-threatening and difficult-to-explain explosions.

We'd all been there.

Rachel winked. "Doctor Carter may be there. Noah Wyle. Oh, _yeah."_

"What happened?" I asked my dad.

"Well, honey..."

"It was the aliens," Crazy Helen interrupted. "They have these exploding rocks they've started spreading around out there. BOOM!"

I gave Helen a tired smile. It was hard not to like somebody who actually cared about the wildlife and kept an eye on it. Sure, she had stories about being abducted by aliens, but then, so did I.

My father rolled his eyes. "They're setting up an Air Force facility out here. A new base way back in the Dry Lands. Zone 91. You see the jets flying over all the time. I suspect they may have lost a bomb or a missile or something. That snake-bit horse must have set it off. The blast caught you."

Well, that explained Crazy Helen's merchandise. "That sounds logical," I said.

"It was the aliens!" Crazy Helen screamed. "They keep the aliens out at Zone 91! That’s why they're building it. That's why it’s all so secret out there. That’s why the Air Force won’t talk about it. Zone 91 is the secret base where the government keeps the aliens it has captured. They're moving 'em out from Area 51. They have ’em out there in cages. Big trucks come through all the time, all covered up and secret. They get secrets of technology from them. You think computers just happened? All that stuff was from aliens. Here, have a souvenir mug. Normally ten-ninety-nine. But you can have it because you got hurt."

Helen grabbed a mug from the shelf, wiped it off on her sleeve, and handed it to me.

Rachel held up her stick. "I got a pecan log," she said.

"You want a mug?" Helen asked her.

"No, the pecan log is great. But I don’t really believe in aliens." Rachel said this with a perfectly straight face.

Helen just smiled. "Lots of people _do,_ young lady. Very smart people, too. Out at Zone 91 they know. Oh, _they_ know! Why else do they need more bases, eh? The government doesn’t want us telling. They watch me. They listen in through the microchip they implanted in my head. They’re listening right now! One of those black helicopters of theirs is listening in and transmitting everything we say to the New World Order headquarters in the Azores, which is where Atlantis is, you know."

This tirade left us all temporarily without anything much to say. We just kind of stared.

"Well, we may as well get out of Helen’s hair," my father said, breaking the spell. "Cassie, honey, do you feel okay? Can you focus your eyes?"

"Um, yes," I said. "But how about that horse?"

My father shook his head, mystified. "Strangest thing. There isn’t a trace left of her. Not a trace."

"Hah. It’s the Martians," Crazy Helen said. "It’s all the fault of those darned aliens."

Rachel and I exchanged a look. We were both having the same thought: _It's_ _a very strange world where a person called Crazy Helen is at least partly right._


	4. Chapter 4

“You’ve never heard of Area 51 before? It’s the Holy Grail of conspiracy nuts," Marco said in between slurps of a Mountain Dew. "Man, don’t you ever go on the Internet? The Internet is full of people who think there are aliens at Area 51. It’s called the Most Secret Place On Earth."

"I go on the Internet," Rachel said. "I just don’t hang out in chat rooms, call myself 'Studboy,' and try to convince people I’m an incredibly handsome thirty-year-old millionaire."

"Excuse me," Marco said, "but I do not use 'Studboy' as my screen name. Give me some credit. I use BaldwinBoyFive. You know, the missing fifth Baldwin brother. The really cool-looking one."

We were all at the mall food court, the day after the incident in the Dry Lands. It wasn't an ideal meeting place, but there had been a reason for it, and that reason was in my hands. I was clutching a shopping bag. Inside were several smaller bags from The Gap and J. Crew.

It was all Rachel’s doing. Despite everything, she had actually remembered my stupid promise. Now I owned outfits. Not just clothing, mind you. _Outfits._

"Even I’ve heard of Area 51," Jake said. "And unlike Marco, I’m a fairly normal human being."

Marco threw a French fry at Jake. Jake ducked. And with a quick movement, Ax snagged the fry out of midair, popped it in his mouth and said, "Mmmm. Grease. Greassss and salt!"

Ax was getting better at being human, but he still didn't exactly blend in.

We paused to watch a floppy-haired kid walk up, looking nervous and out of place. He was jumpy, as if a little scared by the experience of being in the mall, and walked with his shoulders hunched, taking tiny steps. He squinted a little, as if nearsighted, and jumped whenever anybody got really close to him.

We made room for him, and he sat down between Ax and Rachel.

"Hey, Tobias," Marco said. "We were thinking about ordering some pizza. You want mouse meat on yours?"

Tobias looked at him with a blank expression. Not like he was trying to look deliberately opaque, but like he'd forgotten how facial expressions worked. “No need to hide your cravings behind an offer to me, Marco,” he said. “This is a safe place.” To the rest of us, he said very quietly, “I was a human for 13 years before this whole thing started. I know how to do it. You don't all need to stare at me.”

Everyone looked away guiltily.

Seemingly unperturbed, Tobias reached forward, took a chip off Jake's plate, and popped it into his mouth. "So,” he said. “What’s up?"

Six sets of eyes casually scanned the area around us. The mall was not busy, and it was too early for a big dinner crowd at the food court. But we had to be sure that no one was even slightly within range to overhear.

"Rachel and Cassie went out to a secret Air Force base and found horses making phone calls," Marco said.

Tobias’s eyes darted to me, then to Rachel. He blinked at us. "Can someone interpret from Marco-babble to normal language?"

"I think I like you better as a chicken, Tobias," Marco said.

"Red-tailed hawk," Tobias said tolerantly.

Marco shrugged. "Chicken, pigeon, hawk, whatever."

"Um, how about if we get down to business before someone interrupts us?" Jake suggested.

"Okay, _Dad,"_ Marco said. Then, becoming instantly serious, he quickly and efficiently summarized for Tobias what we knew.

“So the Air Force is building a new base out in the middle of nowhere, which Cassie's Dad's acquaintance thinks is connected to Area 51, where she says they keep the aliens.”

“Yes.”

“And this acquaintance is named Crazy Helen. And she thinks the government spies on her using the microchip in her head.”

Rachel and I exchanged a glance. “Pretty much.”

“But we're taking this seriously because, and I can't believe this is the most crazy part of this whole thing, yeerks are infesting horses now?”

“That's the long and short of it.”

“Why?”

"We don't know," Rachel said. "It makes zero sense. Why would yeerks want to make Controllers out of horses?"

"Do horses have some special powers? Pow-werz-zuh?"

I shrugged. "They’re herd animals. Not very smart. Not for mammals, anyway. They can run fast, but there are lots of faster animals. They’re strong, but there are lots of other animals that are stronger." I shrugged again. "I can’t see why the yeerks would be wanting to infest horses."

"Maybe they think they can win the Kentucky Derby," Rachel joked.

"Maybe it’s some kind of strange yeerk entertainment," Jake offered. "Maybe it’s fun for them."

"I don’t believe yeerks do anything for fun, Prince Jake," Ax said. "They would have some reason."

"Ax, please don’t call me ‘Prince Jake.’ Especially not in public."

"Yes, Prince Jake. Jay-kuh."

"Are you two sure about this?" Jake asked Rachel and me. "It was a yeerk you saw? Not a snake or a snail or something?"

"And what if your dad is right, and it was an exploding artillery shell, not a Dracon flash?" Tobias suggested.

"We’re not doubting you," Jake added quickly. "It’s just that there’s no good reason for yeerks to infest horses."

I looked at Rachel. I was sure of what we’d seen. Mostly. "Well... I guess I could be wrong. But I’m pretty sure."

Rachel rolled her eyes. “We saw what we saw, okay? I still have the stupid thing if you want proof.”

We all stared at her in shock.

“What? It's not like I brought it to the mall with me. But I didn't want Cassie's dad to see it and I kind of... haven't gotten rid of it yet.”

“Where is it, then?” Marco asked. “What'd you do, stash an alien corpse in your underwear drawer? That sounds really weird when I say it out loud.”

“Everything sounds weird when you say it, Marco.”

"So, what do we do?" Jake asked, trying to get us all back on track. "Take a look around out in the Dry Lands? See if we can get some more proof, maybe some clues as to what's going on?"

"Very good flying out there," Tobias said. "Lots of sweet thermals."

"And plenty of delicious snakes and toads?" Marco asked with mock innocence.

"I can’t go tomorrow," Jake said. "It’s my dad’s birthday. We’re all going out for dinner."

"Even Tom?" Rachel asked.

"Tom says he’ll be there," Jake said darkly. "But who knows? He spends a lot of time at meetings of The Sharing lately. All the more reason why I _have_ to be there. My dad is not going to celebrate his birthday without at least one of his sons there."

"What did you get your dad?" I asked, trying to lighten the mood.

Jake grinned. "Haven’t done it yet, but I think I’m going to clean the roof gutters for him.”

Marco shuddered. "Actual physical labor? Couldn’t you just get him a nice Hallmark card?"

"I am kind of curious about this thing with the horses," I said. Burning up with curiosity would've been more accurate, but it didn't do to look too enthusiastic. "But we could put it off till the weekend."

"It could be worth checking out," Jake said. "But we don’t need everyone to go along. Who wants to go flying with Cassie tomorrow after school?"

“I'm in,” Tobias said quickly. “I can scout out the area in advance and meet you guys there.” He glanced at Marco and couldn't seem to resist adding, “Have fun at school.”

Okay, I admit it – human Tobias was weird. Not because he was necessarily a strange human – Ax took the cake there (and probably ate it in three bites while mumbling word sounds over and over), but because he was so different to what I'd remembered. I hadn't really known Tobias before the war, but I was pretty sure that if you'd sat him at a table with us back then and Marco had taken a jibe at him, he would've blushed and muttered something self-effacing in the hope of not making any enemies. We'd all changed as a matter of necessity, but he'd done it behind the fierce gaze of a hawk, and as wrong as it sounds, I couldn't quite reconcile our brave, sarcastic scout with Tobias' shy, dorky human form.

Marco, for his part, just gave a little amused eyeroll, and opened his mouth to make a good-natured comeback when Rachel cut him off.

“Me too,” she said. “I want to see how this plays out.”

“Then I guess I'd better come,” Marco added. “Or this could turn into an elephant-on-horse rampage in the middle of the desert for no obvious reason.”

“Only if they're Controller horses,” Rachel said primly. “Ax?”

“I cannot,” Ax said apologetically. “I will have duties to attend to. Ooo.”

I didn't know what duties somebody stranded in an alien forest could possibly have to attend to, but I didn't ask. Jake broke up the meeting and we went our separate ways. Rachel and I left together.

"No one is taking this seriously, are they?" I asked her. "I get the impression Ax thinks we’re nuts."

"Yeerks in horses? Horse-Controllers? It is kind of hard to see where that’s some big threat."

I stared at her. “How so?”

“What do you mean? They're horses. They're hardly dangerous.”

“You don't see how monumentally important this bit of information is?”

Rachel blinked at me. “No, Cassie. I don't.”

I sighed. “Horses aren't sentient, Rachel.” I thought about that for a moment. “That we know of,” I amended, “and acknowledging that our concept of sentience is flawed.”

“Okay. So?”

“So, I've always kind of assumed that yeerks can only inhabit sentient hosts. Stands to reason, doesn't it? All the hosts we've fought have been sentient. Why would you go out of your way to start wars with intelligent races who'll fight back, if any old body will do? But clearly, I was wrong. What species can they infest? What species will they try?”

“They have laser guns and shock troops covered in knives already,” Rachel frowned. “Unless they're going to start collecting bears or something...”

“This isn't just about combat. Imagine you and I are walking out in the middle of nowhere. There are no other people around, so we might talk about mission stuff, like we're doing right now. There's a horse in the paddock behind us, but who cares, right? It's just a horse. Or maybe there's a stray dog running about. Or a pigeon overhead.”

Rachel's eyes widened. “I don't think a yeerk could fit in a pigeon,” she said. “But I see what you mean.”

“Our enemies may not be able to shapeshift like us, but if we're looking at a force that can be a wolf or a bear or a gorilla for three days at a time... well, the limits of that are probably worth exploring, don't you think?”

“I'm not sure what is worse,” Rachel said. “The thought that they're infesting horses for a specific, world-threatening mission, or the thought that they're expanding their range of hosts in general.”

“We should probably find out which it is,” I replied.

“Definitely.”

But something niggled at me.

_Horses aren't sentient. Why go out of your way to start wars with intelligent species who'll fight back, if any body will do?_


	5. Chapter 5

I knelt on the ground in my too-short, poop-stained jeans and fished my small metal box out of the ground with trembling hands. I leafed through various lists – list of known Controllers, list of known morphs, my frustratingly inconsistent research on thought-speak range – and found my notes on yeerks.

 _Can infest horses_ , I wrote. _Host range unknown. What limitations? Brain structure?_

Horses and humans did have basically the same brain structure. I'd looked it up. Sure, some areas were bigger or smaller or a slightly different shape, but all mammals were pretty much the same inside the skull. If you thought of the brain as just an organ that yeerks could interface with, there was no real reason why humans would be possible and horses wouldn't.

But I very much doubted that humans and andalites, or humans and hork-bajir, or especially humans and taxxons, had the same brain structure. I'd seen a hork-bajir brain and it didn't look all that familiar. It made no sense that yeerks would be able to interface with such a wide range of brains across the galaxy. How did something like that evolve? How was it possible?

_Hypothesis 1: extreme variability in neural structures on yeerk home planet_

_Hypothesis 2: very little variability in neural structures in sentient species throughout galaxy_

Neither of them made much sense, nor did I really have enough information to favour one over the other. I supposed that hypothesis 2 made a little more sense in light of the whole 'why go to planets with sentient life' thing. If there was only one kind of structure, one set of signalling chemicals or whatever, that could produce intelligent life, then that would be the obvious marker for the yeerks to use when finding new hosts. It didn't really explain why they went straight for the intelligent species, but maybe “hey, can we buy, like... all of your animals?” wasn't considered a particularly reliable strategy. I figured that humans would probably react well to that, but there was no reason to assume that anybody else in the galaxy would, and therefore no reason to assume that it would make a good standard practice.

_ Why _ _are yeerks conquering planets?_

I stared at that sentence for a bit. That was the key, right there. There had to be a reason for the all-conquering rampage, and if they had a choice in the range of hosts available, that probably informed their decisions. That was the key to the whole war. Why were they invading? For the fun of it? Power? Survival?

Why hadn't I ever asked that obvious, all-important question before?

Yeerks were a plague. They were AIDS mixed with ebola mixed with smallpox spreading across our planet, and if we didn't stop the spread, it would destroy us. But here's the thing about plagues: you don't cure them by being mad at them. You can cure them by removing their hosts, by literally wiping them out – we'd done that to smallpox, after all. But it's really, really hard to do. And there are other ways.

I'd been reading up a lot on evolution and ecology since becoming an Animorph. If I was going to be the 'animal expert' of the group, I was at least going to be good at it. I'd learned a lot of things that I'd never really thought about before. For example, viruses are actually really important for evolution. They help shift genes around, and a lot of who we are today is based on our responses to plagues and soforth. There are also a lot of viruses that we just learn to live with, or even develop partnerships with, chicken pox being the perfect example. Chicken pox is normally pretty safe for kids in rich countries like America, but a much bigger problem for adults, so kids getting it (and thus becoming immune to it as adults) is seen as a good thing. Some parents make sure their kids get it on purpose for this reason. The virus gets an endless supply of hosts in the children that are allowed to catch it; the children get near-immunity to shingles later in life.

Obviously, yeerks were not literally a virus. But the principle stood. We needed to keep our eyes on our goals – freedom for sentient species, protecting our planet – and not just focus on trying to make the yeerks pay, even if we really, really wanted to.

And with that goal in mind, there might be strategies open to us other than 'kill countless sentient beings in battle'.

They could do horses. They could do humans. So they could probably do monkeys and chimpanzees. Monkeys were intelligent, although not as intelligent as humans. But they had hands, unlike horses. Hands were useful.

What else could they do? Cattle? Sheep? Anything we already had a lot of would be really useful. Anything we were farming.

Or we could go the other route – create demand. I quickly wrote down my thoughts as they came to me. I could order them later. Endangered species. We tried to make humans save endangered species by making them look cute, by appealing to human aesthetics... but with a second, alien perspective, we might be able to broaden our net. If endangered species were useful to yeerks, they would help keep their numbers up. Animals useful to humans almost never went extinct, except through hunting, and yeerks didn't kill their prey. With the right laws relating to what could and couldn't be infested...

But none of that mattered, did it?

I put the pen down. I put my head in my hands. None of it mattered. None of it mattered because even if we knew why the yeerks wanted us, even if we could provide acceptable substitutes, we weren't in a position to legislate yeerk actions. We were trying to survive, trying to keep our own freedom, trying to resist an impossible oncoming force. How useful were mutually beneficial hypotheticals against something like that? The yeerks were obviously aware of these options, because they were infesting non-sentient species. And they'd clearly decided to ignore them in favour of slavery. We couldn't play nice against that. We didn’t have the power to dictate how we fought this war.

I was getting kind of tired of not having that power.

Besides, if the war did become public and that kind of bargaining did become an option, I was pretty sure that the countless enslaved humans and their families out there wouldn't be amenable to 'hey, let's give these guys all our animals'. And I couldn't blame them.

Still, non-sentient hosts... that changed the game in so many ways.

There were a lot of stupid, pointless missions that we, as Animorphs, had gone on. But something like this... this wasn't going to be one of them.


	6. Chapter 6

The next day I wore one of my new outfits to school, because I’d promised Rachel I would. I hooked up with her before first period and we walked to class together. Down the main hall.

Rachel, the Goddess of Clothing and Good Grooming… and me.

"You look great!" Rachel assured me, with a smile that looked impressively genuine. She waved to a couple of girls I knew by sight as we passed them, although I couldn’t remember where from. They weren’t classmates. Gymnastics friends, maybe? We passed a boy, who paused. Him, I did know from glass. His name was Charles, and he sat in front of me in math. Rachel gave him a little twinkly wave, too. “Hello, Charles.”

"Hi, Rachel," he replied, smiling awkwardly. "Oh, and hi, um ... Carla."

"See? Charles smiled at you."

"He called me _Carla."_

"Has he ever even spoken to you before?" Rachel asked.

"I guess not."

"See? Progress."

I rolled my eyes. Marco likes to tease Rachel, calling her Xena: Warrior Princess. And when I’m with her I guess I’m Gabrielle. The sidekick. Guys see Rachel first, second, and third. They see me fourth.

Personally, I don’t think that should matter. Looks and clothing don’t matter even slightly to me. And the people who matter are the ones who see past all that. Some girls are born blonde, blue-eyed and tall, with impeccable fashion sense. Some aren't. So what? The body is just a vehicle for the mind.

Of course, Rachel was also better at schoolwork than me. Her nice body wasn’t an impediment to her mind, just a kind of bonus. But so what? The more smart people in the world, the better, right?

"Hey, Rachel. How’s it going?" a passing boy asked, smiling shyly.

"Fine," Rachel said coolly. "Cassie, you’ve met Jawan, haven’t you?"

I shrugged. "Hi, Jawan."

"Hey, Kendra," he said. "See you later in English, Rachel."

 _"Kendra?"_ I asked Rachel.

"He gave you a definite look," Rachel said. "So what if he isn’t good at remembering names?"

"He remembers _your_ name pretty well," I pointed out. Then I spotted Joe. Joe was a friend of mine from when we both took riding lessons together. We didn’t exactly hang out any more, but we’d learned a lot together. He would remember my name.

"Hey, Cassie. Whoa! Whoa! Something’s different about you." He stepped back and stared at me.

"New outfit?" Rachel suggested.

Joe shook his head. "No, that’s not it. Oh, I know what it is!" He snapped his fingers. "You look like you’ve gained weight! Have you been trying to bulk up?"

Rachel reached with one elegant hand and pushed Joe disdainfully out of her way.

"That proves nothing," Rachel said.

"Uh-huh,” I muttered. “I look fatter." It's because I was doing all my exercise as a wolf or a bird. That must be it. Didn't seem fair, really.

"Guys are idiots sometimes."

"Not Jake," I said. Jake had never called me fat, or asked why I didn’t wear makeup or grow my hair out and flatten it, or forgotten my name. Even if he was the little brother of a basketball prodigy and he was constantly surrounded by people who looked like, well, him and Rachel, he’d never been a jerk about it.

Rachel rolled her eyes. "Jake is the exception that proves the rule," she said. "And there he is now."

Jake was cruising down the hall, joking and talking with some non-Animorph friends. Part of the advantage of not having been popular before this whole thing was that I didn't have to keep up any out-of-invasion friendships. I had Rachel. I'd had other friends, of course, but distant enough that I could let them drift apart. People like Jake and Rachel didn't have that luxury.

"Hi, Cassie," Jake said, peeling off from his buds. "Hey, Rachel."

Rachel stood back, and held her hands out toward me like a fashion designer showing off her latest supermodel. "So?"

"So what?" Jake asked blankly.

"So the outfit! The outfit!" Rachel exploded in frustration. "Doesn’t Cassie look great in these new clothes? These clothes that actually fit, and have no raccoon poop stains? Doesn’t she look fabulous?"

Jake smiled his slow smile. "Of course she looks great. She _always_ does. You guys have fun in the Dry Lands this afternoon. And try to be careful."

He walked off down the hall leaving me with a nice, warm glow that I really hoped didn't show on my face.

Rachel stared at me. "Okay, he’s an idiot, too."

"No, you were right the first time," I said smugly. "He’s the exception.”

We reached first period class. I sighed deeply, my usual reaction to first period. The classroom was stuffy and airless. The windows just looked out at the blank brick wall of the gym.

I went to my seat and tried to remind myself of what we were supposed to have studied the night before. Did I do my homework? Oh, yeah. I had. It was in my –

"No! No! It can’t be!"

Marco’s voice. He sits two rows over. But now he leaped clear over one row of seats and slithered into an empty desk next to mine. He stared at me, wide-eyed with wonder. Way too much wonder.

"Who is this vision of loveliness? Who is this fantasy come true? Excuse me, but are you Tyra Banks? No, no, you can’t be any mortal girl. So much perfection could never be achieved by a mere human. You’re an angel descended from heaven! I mean, they say clothes make the man, but these clothes make you an _angel."_

I took out my homework and placed it on my desk. "Are you done?" I asked Marco.

He thought for a moment, then nodded. "Yeah. That should be about enough."

"What did Rachel pay you?"

He grinned. "Two bucks. Girls are such idiots sometimes. I’d have done it for a dollar."

I rolled my eyes, not at him exactly, but not bothering to turn away. “You set for tonight?”

“Oh, yeah. Promises to be fun,” he said in the voice of one not expecting to have any fun. “Can’t we just, I dunno, go to the movies or something? We never go to the movies.”

We had gone to the movies once. Ax had literally stolen candy from a baby right before we’d watch a yeerk die in some guy’s brain and seen him get dragged away, unable to do anything about it.

“Next week I’ll take you out shopping for a nice new outfit to match mine, Marco,” I said. “We can be twins.”

“I don’t know if I could pull it off like you do,” he joked. “I don’t have your inner radiance.”

“Is that the extra dollar’s worth of comments?” I asked, raising an eyebrow, and it was Marco’s turn to roll his eyes.

“What’d you get for question four?” he muttered, trying to peek at my homework.

“You haven’t done it?” I asked, quickly covering my answers.

“I was busy doing… you know, our stuff.”

“This weekend? What were you doing this weekend?”

“Okay, fine, I was watching the Powerpuff Girls marathon I’d taped last weekend while we were doing stuff. Still counts.”

I sighed and handed over my homework. There was no point in arguing. We’d go crazy without some downtime. For me, that was looking after animals with my Dad; for Rachel, it was shopping; for Marco, it was cartoons. Whatever. And we needed to keep our grades up. I knew Marco was smart, and I knew what we were doing in class wouldn’t affect our careers or anything, not with a war happening. Why not let him copy my answers? School was little more than a cover any more.

A cover, and a system by which teenagers were funnelled into the hands of the Yeerk Empire. I hadn’t forgotten how the yeerks had turned our school into a recruitment centre, our academic expectations into a pressure control to carefully push a steady stream of kids into The Sharing. I hadn’t forgotten that the teacher who would grade my homework was probably an alien invader, that the kids around me could be the enemy in disguise – that Charles and Jawan and Joe might not be in control of their own smiles and greetings as aliens in their brains kept up the appearance of the boys whose lives they’d stolen. And here I was, worried about… what? Whether people liked the clothes Rachel had picked for me? The kids settling in around me as Marco struggled to copy my answers before the teacher arrived could be slaves screaming helplessly in their own heads, and I was still worried about high school stuff. I disappointed myself, sometimes.

But then, I was supposed to be a normal teenager. The best way to act like I cared about stupid high school stuff was to care about stupid high school stuff, I supposed. You’d think it would be hard to maintain a ‘double life’; student by day and freedom fighter by… other parts of the day… but my life wasn’t double so much as it was secret. I had too many secrets. The Cassie sitting at the desk was the same Cassie that would be surveying the Dry Lands that night, and I might still be thinking of stupid stuff then.

You know, unless aliens started shooting at me. That usually took priority.


	7. Chapter 7

<So if there's a reason behind this horse thing, it's probably connected to Zone 91,> Tobias reasoned. We were drifting in lazy arcs over the Dry Lands, watching scrub, more scrub, and rocks. We tried to keep as far apart as possible, but we were keenly aware that we were moving through territory being closely watched by both yeerks and the US military. Not that the US military would care about birds. But it was a dumb place to start a fight.

<Do you think these bases are named randomly, or did they build 40 bases between Area 51 and Zone 91?> Marco mused. <That seems like a lot of bases. How many aliens could they be hiding?>

<I'm pretty sure they just use them to test experimental aircraft or whatever,> Tobias said.

<Then why are the yeerks interested in them?> Rachel asked.

<Maybe there's a new plane that they're worried about? Something that can take down a Bug fighter, perhaps?>

There was a slight pause as we all waited for Ax to make a remark about 'primitive human technology', then realised he wasn't there. Sometimes I think we spend way too much time together.

<It's probably not that,> I said, since our resident alien was absent.

<Look,> Tobias said. <A flight of geese! They are amazing fliers.>

I saw them up above us. They were going the same direction as us, but moving in a tight V-formation.

<They don’t seem too fast,> Rachel said. <We could outfly them if we wanted.>

Tobias laughed. <Yeah, right. See the way they fly? They never stop flapping. They’re like machines. They can fly hundreds of miles. You ever watch a dog try to catch a passing car? That’s what it would be like, us trying to catch those geese.>

He was right. The geese didn't rely on thermals to glide about like us. They just kept power-flying. Soon they were way past us.

They'd make a pretty good morph, actually. Not suspicious in large groups, capable of moving great distances, and capable of defending themselves on the ground. I made a mental note of it.

<This will be so cool,> Marco said. <Zone 91! We will penetrate the very heart of the government conspiracy to cover up alien visitors!>

<Marco, just how dumb are you?> Rachel asked. <We know about the _real_ aliens. We know they don’t look like E.T. or the guys you always see on alien books. And we know the real aliens, the yeerks, don’t go around kidnapping backwoods goobers and doing medical experiments on them.>

<Maybe there are two different bunches of aliens,> Marco said. <Maybe there are these aliens who crash-landed back in the fifties. Plus the yeerks more recently.>

<Yeah, right, Agent Mulder,> Rachel grumbled. <Earth is the crossroads of every passing alien. We’re the McDonald’s next to the highway of the galaxy.>

They argued on for a while. Eventually I tuned them out. It is very quiet in the high air. No noise from the ground. None. Sometimes you hear the engines of a jet flying by, five miles farther up. But mostly all you hear is the all-pervasive white noise of wind rushing over feathers. And the sound of your own wings beating. It's like breath and heartbeat, loud enough to drown out any other minor sounds.

We used the altitude of each thermal to jump to the next. We would fly out of one gentle vortex of warm air, descend to the next, and let it raise us up again, hovering on air like a buoy on ocean waves. Zone 91 was a fair distance out.

Eventually, Tobias said, <Hey. Check out that sign down there. The one by the dirt road.>

I aimed my osprey vision and read:

STOP!

GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. RESTRICTED AREA.

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.

ALL OTHERS ARE SUBJECT TO ARREST AND PROSECUTION. THIS MEANS YOU.

<I’m guessing this is the beginning of the famous Zone 91,> I said.

<Friendly, aren’t they?> Rachel said.

<If you were trying to conceal a vast government conspiracy to hide an alien spacecraft, you’d be paranoid, too,> Marco said. I wasn’t sure whether he was joking or not.

The base itself was a cluster of squat, unattractive buildings that all looked as if they’d been built forty years ago. There were three very large buildings that looked like aircraft hangars. And there was an airstrip. But I could also see lots of vehicles; trucks, Humvees, even some tanks. And there were horses, just scattering, sauntering through the base like it wasn’t there.

<Marco, I know a lady you’d love,> Rachel muttered. <Her name is Crazy Helen. Crazy, because she sounds like you.>

<Let’s look for those horses,> I suggested. <I think that’s the place to start.>

<The phone-using horses,> Tobias said. <Horse-Controllers.>

Something about the way he said it made it sound like he doubted the whole thing.

<You want to see the yeerk corpse?> Rachel asked. <Come around to my place later. I'll show it to you.>

<You still have it?> I asked. <Ew.>

Rachel ignored me. <Over there,> she said. <A bunch of horses. Over by the water hole. Maybe that’s them.>

We banked sharply left and headed toward them. There were half a dozen mares, two gangly colts, and one big stallion who stood off by himself on a slight rise. The stallion sniffed the breeze, head high. The eldest mare looked up periodically, and when one of the colts looked to wander off, dashed over to steer it back to the group.

<That’s not them,> I said.

<How do you know?>

<Because they’re acting exactly like horses, that’s why. They have colts. And the stallion is behaving like a stallion. The horses we want won’t act that way.>

<Okay. Well, you guys need to demorph,> Tobias said. <You’re nearly at the two-hour limit. There are some rocks over there. You’ll have shade and privacy.>

So we headed for the rocks and landed. It was a nice little enclosure, with tall, rounded boulders all around us and clean, dry sand under our feet. We were completely hidden from anyone coming in any direction.

Tobias came to rest beside us as the rest of us returned to our human forms. Three barefoot kids in spandex and a bird of prey, hunkered down between rocks in the Dry Lands.

The sun beat down, but we were mostly in shade. A warm breeze blew and whistled between the rocks: WHEEE-HEEEEEE-WHEEE-EEEEEWHEEE

"All we need now is a picnic lunch," Marco said. "Tobias! Go rustle us up some juicy rats and toads."

<No need,> Tobias said coolly. <Just eat that snake you’re sitting on.>

"Yaaahhh!" Marco screamed as he leaped to his feet and began slapping his behind frantically.

A small black snake slithered away from the pocket of warm sand where Marco had been sitting.

“Careful!” I said. “Don't hurt it!”

"I’m bit! I’m gonna die! A rattler bit my butt!"

<It’s not a rattler, and he didn’t bite you,> Tobias said. <He’s just a harmless bull snake.>

"No snake is harmless," Marco muttered. "But keep your hawk eyes open in case a rattler does come for me."

<I will protect your butt from snake bite, Marco,> Tobias said solemnly.

"Let’s just morph back," Rachel suggested. "We don’t need to rest. I feel fine."

"There’s no rush, is there?" I asked. I'd had a lot of practice at morphing; we all had. I knew we had a couple more shifts in us before the morphing process started to wear us out. But I was kind of nervous that we might be thrown into battle at any moment, and I didn't know how much morphing we'd have to do. I wanted to be well-rested.

Rachel shrugged. "No. No rush." She stretched up on her toes and looked around at the boulders. The WHEE-EEING wind caught her hair and blew it in her face. "It looks like some scene from an old Western. The good guys are up here in the rocks hiding from the bad guys. All we need is six-guns and rifles."

CHICK-CLICK!

<What the – > Tobias cried.

CHICK-CLICK! CHICK-CLICK!

I froze at the sound. I’d heard it before in real life. And I’d heard it on TV a thousand times. It was unmistakable. It was the sound of weapons being cocked.

I looked upward and there above us, pointed straight at our heads, were the black muzzles of automatic rifles. I was so busy staring at the guns, it took a few seconds before I even noticed there were people holding the weapons. They wore helmets covered in camouflage fabric. Desert-style camouflage in shades of tan and beige. Their uniforms were desert camouflage, too.

Their faces were not friendly.

One of the soldiers stood up and put his hands on his hips. "Okay now, here’s what we’re going to do. The three of you are gonna lie down, facedown in the sand, and place your hands behind your heads, fingers laced together."

"But we’re not _doing_ anything," Rachel protested, sounding pretty much like I remember her sounding years ago when her mom would catch us rifling through her closet looking for clothes to try on.

"You have illegally entered a restricted government facility," the man said. "And you are in a world of hurt. Sergeant! Search them for weapons or contraband. And someone chase away that big old hawk there. He’s staring at me."

"Yes, sir, Lieutenant."

<You guys, just go along with them,> Tobias said as he opened his wings and began to fly off. <I’ll keep an eye out for you. Just play dumb.>

Marco gave me a look that said, as clearly as if he could thought-speak, 'I am going to make _so much fun_ of Tobias for not noticing these guys later'.

"You heard him, Marco," Rachel whispered with an exaggerated wink. "Be yourself."

Naturally, Rachel was completely unafraid. But then, Rachel is never afraid. I was afraid. But that’s because I’m sane, unlike Rachel.

I was also confused. They were humans. Earth military. We'd been captured by _Earth military_.

The soldiers leaped down from the rocks and quickly searched us as we lay facedown in the sand. It’s not like we had any pockets to search or anything.

"All right, get up. Put on your shoes," the lieutenant said.

I winced. Shoes! Oh, man, we’d never be able to explain this.

"No shoes, sir!" the sergeant said.

I saw the frown form on the lieutenant’s face. "Hey. Wait a minute. It’s a couple of miles back to the road. How’d you get here without shoes? For that matter, there hasn’t been a car down that road all day. How did you get here at all?"

I looked at Rachel. Rachel looked at Marco. Marco put on a big grin and said, "It was the Martians, Lieutenant. We were dropped here by aliens."


	8. Chapter 8

“My name is Captain Torreli. I am in charge of security for this facility."

We were in a very small, very airless, very brightly lit room. There were no windows. And whenever the door opened you saw a guy in an Air Force uniform.

A tough-looking guy in an Air Force uniform.

A tough-looking guy in an Air Force uniform, cradling a small machine gun.

There was also a bulletin board. On it were small posters reminding everyone that "Security is our business" and exhorting everyone to tolerate "Zero Defects." There was a flyer for The Gardens, looking extremely out of place. Below the flyer was a sign-up sheet, bearing Sunday's date and a lot of names.

"Hi, Captain," Marco said. "How’s it going?"

The captain glanced over at the lieutenant who had picked us up. The lieutenant just shrugged.

"Now look, kids, maybe you don’t realize it, but you’re in trouble," the captain said.

"Yes, sir, we realize we made a big mistake," I said. "It was totally an accident. We didn’t even know there was anything back here in the Dry Lands. And boy, we’d never, ever come back again if you let us go, that’s for sure." I smiled innocently. I nudged Rachel and she smiled innocently as well. I prayed that Marco would get a clue and smile innocently so we could just leave.

"So. Where do you keep the alien?" Marco asked.

The captain pressed his lips tightly together until they turned pale. Then he said, "Look, kid, this is an Air Force installation. We don’t discuss what we do here, but I am authorized to tell you one thing: There are no aliens here!"

"Yeah, right. Sir," Marco snorted.

"What’s your name, son?"

"Um . . . Mulder. Fox Mulder."

"Well, you are in a world of hurt, Fox Mulder. You have violated federal law. You could be thrown in prison!"

"Sir?" I interrupted. "Please just ignore Ma... Fox." Dammit, I needed to learn how to lie properly.

"Yeah. He’s an idiot," Rachel added.

"He just likes to annoy people. We’re just kids, you know. We didn’t mean any harm. Couldn’t you just give us a warning?"

"A very stern warning, even," Rachel agreed. She fluttered her long blonde eyelashes just a little, just enough to look unintentional.

"Normally that’s just what we’d do," the captain said. "We do get our share of Looney Tunes and crackpots out here." He looked directly at Marco as he said 'crackpots.' "However, we have ourselves a little mystery here. See, none of you is wearing shoes. The lieutenant’s men searched the area. No shoes. And it is physically impossible to have walked across all that undergrowth and through those rocks without shoes."

All three of us sat forward. I was pretty sure we were all thinking the same thing. We _could_ simply tell the truth. We could explain that we had alien technology to fight a secret intergalactic war, and we could prove it. And then we could simply ask what the yeerks wanted with the base. That's what we'd been trying to do, wasn't it? Expose the invasion?

But there were a few reasons that we couldn't actually do that. We hadn't voted on it, for one. Outing ourselves to the US military seemed like a whole-team decision. It could also create the distinct possibility that we'd end up in those alien cages that Crazy Helen was so vocal about. We had no idea how the Air Force would treat aliens, or whether they'd believe we were human, or whether they'd care. And, of course, there was the ever-present risk that there was already an alien slug wrapped around Captain Torelli's brain.

"So we’re busted for not having shoes?" Rachel asked.

"Look, what’s the big deal, sir?" Marco asked. "If you have an alien here, why not just tell everyone?"

The captain gave Marco a long, hard stare. "I want the three of you to write down your names and your parents’ phone numbers on this piece of paper." He shoved a clipboard at Marco. "We’re gonna call your folks. Maybe they’ll appreciate your sense of humor.”

I watched over Marco’s shoulder as he wrote down "Fox Mulder." Then he followed it by a phone number.

Rachel identified herself as Dana Scully.

Then it was my turn. And I drew a total blank. See, I don’t really watch _X-Files._ I'm also not great at lying on the spot. Give me half an hour alone and quiet with a piece of paper, and I could probably come up with a fake name and an airtight story for our presence. But not on the spot like that.

The captain stared at me as I held the pen poised over the paper and sweated.

_What name? What name?_

"Don’t you know your own name?"

"Um... sure. It’s... Cindy! That’s it, Cindy. Cindy... Crawford."

Marco stared at me. Rachel stared at me. I wrote down the name with a trembling hand and then wrote in some numbers.

The two officers left. There was a loud click from the lock closing.

"Cindy Crawford?" Marco demanded. "What are you, nuts?"

"Me? Me? How about you?"

"Every guy in the country knows who Cindy Crawford is!"

"We have to get out of here. Fast!" Rachel said. "I gave him the phone number for Pizza Hut delivery."

"I gave him the number for the Sports Scoreboard recording," Marco said.

"I just gave him one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight!" I said.

"Eight? You gave him eight numbers?" Marco laughed. "Remind me not to ever be a spy with you. Now how do we get outta here?"

We got out of there. We went home.

I could describe our daring escape in detail, but come on. We were shapeshifters, they were unprepared, and they'd left us alone for five minutes.


	9. Chapter 9

We demorphed on the far side of all the dangerous signs, away from the base. It was a long flight home and we didn't want to have to find somewhere in the city to do it. We found a little gully with a stream and lots of bushes to shelter us from anyone looking in.

Marco grinned. "I wish I could see the look on Captain Torreli’s face when he realizes we’ve all three disappeared."

Rachel punched Marco in the arm. "You moron! Why did you keep provoking him with all that alien talk? He would have let us go."

"Actually," Marco said, with no trace of his usual attitude, "he would _not_ have let us go until he contacted our parents. And we couldn’t have that, could we? So I deliberately provoked him because now he’ll just write us off as another bunch of deluded wackos. If we’d seemed perfectly sensible he’d _really_ wonder what we were doing there with no shoes."

Rachel glared at him suspiciously.

“So, I'm thinking we get an actual plan before coming back out here?” I asked. “I mean, that was flat-out embarrassing. Jake is so going to laugh at us.”

“We got detained by the Air Force,” Marco groaned. “We take down yeerks on a regular basis and the Air Force got us. At least we all look stupid together.”

"So now what?" Rachel asked. "It’s getting late. We need to get home."

<You guys should morph as soon as you’re ready. It’ll be cooling down soon. Fewer thermals equals harder flying.>

“And no horse-Controllers,” I sighed. “A waste of time all round.”

<I hear something,> Tobias said. He was perched on a twisted, gnarled piece of dried up wood, and he seemed way more alert after the whole Air Force thing. <Everyone down. Hide until I see what it is.>

He flapped his wings and took off as Marco, Rachel, and I crawled down under a bush. Unfortunately, it was a thorny bush.

"Oh, _this_ is fun," Marco muttered softly.

<It’s just some horses. It’s okay,> Tobias called down from the sky above.

Marco started to crawl out from hiding. I grabbed his arm. "No. Wait," I hissed.

A half dozen horses climbed stiffly down the side of the gully heading for the water. They were led by a gray stallion.

Led by a stallion? I narrowed my eyes. That wasn't right. It was possible, but it was weird.

"See? Horses. Now can I get this thorn out of my butt?"

I shook my head and put my finger to my lips. I watched the horses climb down. I looked closely for anything that looked strange or unusual. But they sure looked like any old horses.

Kind of. One stallion, no colts or fillies. Six mares. Stallion in the lead. A nice-looking roan that almost looked as if she'd come from thoroughbred stock took up the rear. That was definitely weird. Horse herds were led by mares, and the lead mare should be up front. The stallion should be in back, picking up any stragglers. Was it possible they'd switched positions? Maybe, if there were predators about. But the roan was far too young to be the lead mare.

I shot Rachel and Marco a look. They looked back at me, confused.

Four of the horses lowered their big heads and began to drink. A fifth horse stood guard. The roan paused beside the stallion a moment, as if whispering in his ear.

Then, suddenly...

PLOP! PLOPPLOPPLOP! PLOP!

The guard horse began to do what horses do. If you know what I mean.

"That horse is taking a dump," Marco whispered.

"Thanks for pointing that out, Beavis," Rachel said. "We wouldn’t have noticed without you."

"Horse patties," Marco said. "Prairie pies. Heh-heh-heh-heh."

"That does it. I’m not sharing a bush with..." Rachel began to say.

"Shh! Look! Look!"

To my amazement, the horse who had been pooping stopped. The other horses looked over at her and neighed. I swear they were laughing.

And then the horse in question walked away, moved behind a tree out of sight of the other horses, and finished her business.

"A _modest_ horse?" I asked smugly.

Rachel nodded. "Yeah. It does seem just a little weird."

We waited till the horses had finished drinking and moved on. Tobias flew down and landed beside us. I crawled out through the brambles and brushed myself off.

"I’ve never seen a horse hide behind a tree to do her business." I looked at Marco and Tobias. "Are you guys satisfied? These are _not_ normal horses."

“Yeah,” Marco said, shaking his head slightly in disbelief. “Those are aliens. We are dealing with aliens inside horses.”


	10. Chapter 10

The next day was Saturday. We met at my barn.

“You got detained by the Air Force?” Jake asked, frowning.

“Not the point,” Rachel said quickly. “Horses. We saw the horses.”

Jake raised an eyebrow and glanced from face to face. We all tried to look innocent and focused. He sighed. “Right. Horse-Controllers. Definitely a thing.” Apparently, my and Rachel's report hadn't been enough for the boys, and they were only just starting to believe us. I crushed my annoyance at that before it threatened to get in the way of the mission.

“Yep.” Marco was flipping through one of the magazines that accumulated in the barn whenever we had to keep constant surveillance on a patient. According to the cover, it could tell him how to have great hair and wow his man without breaking the bank.

“So how do we spy on them?” Rachel asked. “That many birds of prey out there for that long is going to get suspicious eventually. And it's not exactly seagull territory.”

“Well, I have a horse morph,” I shrugged. “That seems the obvious choice.”

“You're not going in alone,” Jake said immediately. “What if they try to infest you?”

“Then I'll make sure I'm slightly more difficult to catch than the other horses, so they go for them instead. But you're right,” I conceded. “One horse alone would look weird. Unfortunately, the only horse we have here right now is Midnight. We can't all be Midnight.”

"Identical horses," Marco mused. "Sweet Valley Horses. Hmmm. That could be a TV show."

"Horses. Hore-hore-hore-sezuh," Ax said.

Marco spread his hands wide, palm up. "Is that it, Ax? Or was there more to your comments?"

"Horses are quadrupeds," Ax said. "Much more sensible than walking around perched on two rickety legs like humans do. Rickety. Rick-kuhtee. Is that a funny word?"

"Yeah, ’rickety’ is hysterical," Rachel said. "So, where do we find six different horses for us to morph?"

<The Gardens?> Tobias suggested.

I closed the fox’s cage and wiped my hands on my jeans. "All they have at The Gardens are exotic horse breeds. We want horses who look like horses."

"How about one of the farms around here?" Jake suggested.

I bit my lip. “Everyone around here knows me. If you're all going to be horses, I shouldn't be present.”

<We don't all need to be horses,> Tobias pointed out from his place in the rafters. <A few should do. Just a few might be better, in fact; if there's trouble, the others can fly off and morph somewhere.>

“Ax should do it,” Rachel said, “in case we need alien knowledge. Draw straws for the third horse?”

<I'll do it,> Tobias said. <It's much easier for me to unobtrusively acquire a horse, and I don't have a cover to blow.>

We all looked at each other and shrugged. Getting Ax near a horse was probably the hardest bit, but he, too, didn't have a cover to blow. And if anybody saw him, well, were they really going to believe their eyes? Unless they were a Controller, of course. If a Controller saw him, we might have a problem.

<Can I ask one question?> Tobias asked. <Why would the yeerks be taking over the bodies of horses? Do we have any ideas on that yet?>

"Good question," Jake said.

"It has to be about Zone 91," Marco said. "They start trying this stuff right while the Air Force get this base up? Too much of a coincidence."

“There were horses running about between those buildings and nobody seemed to care,” I agreed. “But what could be out there that interested them? And why not just take over military personnel?”

“Taking military personnel might be a problem,” Rachel said, chewing her lip. “Soldiers have to be really fit, don't they?”

“I imagine so.”

“Right. Well, remember that whole thing with the Star Defenders? What they said about the hospital? Maybe the soldiers get a lot of physicals. Maybe they have their own doctors. If there's some kind of... of head scan...”

“Or hearing test!” I added, understanding. “A yeerk pushing its way through your eardrum has to affect hearing. Maybe not that we'd notice everyday, but if the exact same kind of ear damage kept showing up in a base like that...”

“They'd need to make sure that the soldiers were stationed near a yeerk pool, too,” Jake put in. “And got leave every three days.”

<Probably not impossible,> Tobias pointed out. <But a lot of work if they just have one small mission.>

“Right,” I said. “So. If they're using horses, they probably don't have Controllers in the base, or at least not in the right parts of the base. And they're probably trying to avoid that kind of tricky operation, so it's not a long-term mission.”

“And it suggests that Zone 91 isn't a yeerk base,” Marco added, which I hadn't even considered.

“It sounds like a surveillance mission,” Ax put in. “Perhaps they are monitoring something. Ing-ing-ing,” he added as an afterthought.

“Monitoring what, though?” I asked. “If there's something they want out there, they'd go get it.”

“Unless they don't know if it's actually there,” Marco said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, maybe they don't know if the conspiracy nuts are right? Maybe they heard something that adds up a little too well to be groundless and decided to check it out.”

<The horses wandering about the compound don’t go into the buildings, though,> Tobias pointed out. <That would look really strange. If there was anything there, they would not have access to it. And they would not be able to search for it for very long before getting noticed.>

“If they knew where it was, though...” Realisation hit me. “They don't need to go in the buildings. If that was all this was about, and they could do it, they'd be in and out in a day, right? And if they couldn't do it, they'd try something else.”

“Yeerks are not known for their inventiveness,” Ax said doubtfully.

I ignored him. That wasn't the point. “Look, the base is still being set up, right? According to Crazy Helen, they're moving things in from Area 51.”

“Crazy Helen, a veritable font of reliable information,” Marco remarked.

“Anyway. What if what they're looking for was locked away in Area 51? What if they don't know when it'll be shipped in, and they're waiting to see it unloaded?”

“Yeerks think something strange is going on in Area 51,” Jake said slowly, pacing out the chain of logic. “Yeerks can't easily gain fast access to a top secret military base. Yeerks do... something... to convince the Air Force to establish a base a lot closer to their yeerk pool and move the thing they're interested in there, probably hack their computers or something. Yeerks hang about to monitor what's coming in, so they can... grab, or activate, or destroy the thing when it shows up. Whatever it is.”

“That's what I'm thinking,” I confirmed. “I mean, it seems a little weird otherwise, right? Zone 91 just happening to be built in Yeerk Central?” There was doubt in my voice, not because I didn't have confidence in the hypothesis, but because I had no real data that we were in fact in Yeerk Central beyond the fact that Visser Three always seemed to be hanging around. They could've had dozens of yeerk pools for all we knew. Maybe Visser Three just hung around because we kept attacking our particular area. Maybe the invasion was going off without a hitch in other places.

“Just to clarify,” Marco said, “our going theory is that the Air Force is hiding secret aliens or alien technology in Zone 91 and/or Area 51?”

Rachel rolled her eyes and sighed. “Yes, Marco.”

Marco punched the air. “I knew it!”


	11. Chapter 11

There were a couple of problems with our plan. One problem was the distance – it took time to keep heading way out of town like that. But a bigger problem was that we had no idea when whatever the yeerks were looking for was going to show up. Even the yeerks didn't seem to know. And even though Ax and Tobias didn't have school or anything to worry about, even they could only be in morph for a couple of hours at a time. We needed to narrow our surveillance down to discrete windows of activity. We needed to know what times our surveillance was needed, what times the thing the yeerks were after was likely to be delivered.

We needed inside information.

It was Saturday afternoon. Ax and Tobias had gotten their horse morphs. I'd told them to try to get mares, because my morph was a mare, and adult horses of both sexes didn't herd together except when a herd had a breeding stallion. The yeerks probably wouldn't notice, but it would be just our luck to try to blend in with a herd containing the only horse expert in the Yeerk Empire.

I glanced back at Rachel, who gave me a sort of half-shrug, then looked away to stop Ax from eating a twig. Tobias loitered awkwardly behind them, staring up at the sky. I would've preferred to have Marco on this particular mission, but I'd already been seen with Rachel and exposing the majority of the Animorphs in one go seemed kind of like a bad idea. It didn't matter all that much if Tobias and Ax's human morphs were seen.

I steeled myself, and knocked on the door of the souvenir shop.

Crazy Helen pulled open the door, her face widening into a grin. “Cassie! Came back for a souvenir?”

“Uh, yeah. I brought friends.” I waved them forward.

“Hi, Helen,” Rachel said as she entered the shop, smiling easily as if she wasn't nervous or shy at all.

“You know Rachel. This is Max and Tobias,” I said, waving the boys in.

“Pleased to meet you,” Tobias said.

“I am Max. Maaa-ksuh,” Ax said.

“So Cassie said,” Helen said warily. “Hi. Want a mug? Only nineteen ninety-nine.”

Ax took the mug from her and squinted at it. He'd seen mugs before, of course, although probably not ones quite so dusty. I heard Rachel mutter quietly, “Ax, don't eat anything in here, okay?”

“So,” I said quickly. “My friends are really interested in Zone 91.”

“Are they now?” Helen asked, brightening.

“Yes,” Tobias said unconvincingly, his face completely blank. “I heard they have aliens out there.”

This was definitely a Marco mission.

“Tobias believes in aliens,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” Tobias said solemnly.

But if I thought he sounded unconvincing, Helen didn't seem to notice. “Right you are, my boy,” she said cheerfully. “They experiment on 'em, take 'em apart, take apart their technology. They reverse engineer it. You can hear 'em testing all their new spaceships overhead at night. Whoom!” She swept her arm out over our heads, as if indicating the flight of a theoretical alien-derived spaceship. “It's how we went to the moon, you know. That's why they had to fake the moon landing! The real one had their secret spaceships in it!”

Ax looked somewhat alarmed. “They experiment on aliens? Ay-li-ennnn-zuh? Ekssssperi-peri-men-tuh?”

“Darn right they do!” Helen said cheerfully. “But then, the Martians are always experimentin' on us, aren't they?” She tapped her teeth, as if that was supposed to mean something to us.

Ax just looked more confused. He opened his mouth, but I cut him off.

“Um,” I said, “we were wondering if you knew anything about Zone 91 being set up? Like, when supplies came in, that sort of thing?”

“Oh! You lot looking to go on a spy run?” She raised an eyebrow at me. “Is you dad okay with that, Cassie?”

“A spy run?” I asked. “What's a spy run?”

“You know. Goin' to check out the base. Gather proof. Take photos. Me and the girls go out some weekends. Take a van, load it with long-range and darkvision cameras, have a barbecue... hang on, I got a schedule...” she bustled behind a counter completely covered in various alien posters and figurines, pulled open a drawer, and took out a folder. “Let's see. Plane comes in once a month, came in last week. Trucks come on Saturdays about ten at night and Wednesdays at six in the afternoon. Saturdays make better scout times, 'cause of the darkness, but either way it's hard to get too close, 'cause of the machine guns.”

“Right,” I said. Ax was licking the dust off the bottom of a mug. Probably time to go. “Thanks, Helen. We should probably get going.”

“Look out for yourselves,” she said, then lowered her voice. “You might want to keep an eye on your friend there,” Crazy Helen told me, nodding at Ax. “I don't think he's all there.”


	12. Chapter 12

<Hey,> Tobias said, <aren't they the modest horses?>

It was that night, a little before eight. Two hours before the delivery trucks were scheduled to come in. Hopefully, the yeerks had some idea of when whatever they were after was being moved, and their presence meant that it was going to be in about two hours. If not, we might be doing horse monitor duty for weeks.

<Are you sure?> Jake asked.

<Yeah. Even in this light I can recognise their markings. Barely.>

<We need to get you an owl morph, Tobias,> I said.

<Owls,> Tobias scoffed. But he didn't disagree with me.

As usual, Jake brought us back on track. <Ax, how long have we been in morph?>

<We have been in morph for twenty-six of your minutes, Prince Jake.>

<Our minutes?> Marco asked. <They're everyone's minutes.>

<Don't call me Prince,> Jake said.

<Yes, Prince Jake.>

<Right,> Jake said. <We keep an eye on these horses for the next hour or so. Then we morph and Cassie, Ax and Tobias have an hour to blend in with them before these trucks arrive.>

<The next hour or so?> Tobias asked. <You want us to stay above them for an hour?>

<Horses don't see well at a distance,> I said, <and it's getting dark. The horse-Controllers won't notice us in the sky. We're perfectly safe.>

<That's not the point,> Tobias said. <The point is, it's already pretty dark. And sand is good at holding heat, but not that good. In an hour, the thermals up here are gonna be weak and scarce. Flying is gonna be _really_ hard. >

<We'll stay up as long as we can,> Jake said.

<We need geese,> I said thoughtfully. <Geese are great at this.>

<Geese are clumsy bullies,> Tobias sniffed. <Not to me, we don't want the same things. But to you guys. Ever fought a goose? You don't want to.>

<So they’re great fliers but they suck?> Marco asked.

<Yeah. They’re the jocks of the bird world.>

<I’m a jock,> Jake sniffed.

<No, you’re an Animorph.>

I tuned out the conversation as I concentrated on keeping pace with the horse-Controllers. I wanted to make sure that they were still Controllers. If the yeerks were just capturing and releasing random horses when they felt like it, they'd be really difficult to keep track of. But since we'd spotted these horses just the previous day, the yeerks probably hadn't left their hosts in any case. It was unlikely that we'd spotted them right before they needed to feed.

Still, it didn't hurt to make sure.

And it quickly became obvious that they were indeed not normal horses. The stallion took the lead wherever they went, seeming to scout out the area as he went. The mares moved behind him at apparent random. All horse herds look random to the untrained eye, but when you knew what to look for, there was underlying order. And here, there wasn't. They didn't have a lead mare. They didn't have a pecking order that made very much sense in horse terms. Their stallion wasn't their stallion, and they didn't have any foals.

I wondered if the mares had had foals in their old herd that the yeerks had abandoned to starve. I wondered if they'd been taken from the same herd, or if they were all lost among strangers, puppetted by a force in their heads that they didn't understand. I felt a sudden, passionate surge of hatred, a desire to drop down and rake my talons across the heads of these invaders... but of course I'd only be attacking the horses if I did that.

Tobias had been right – flying did get harder as time went on and the ground cooled. Eventually, Jake called for a halt, and we all demorphed in some boulders and scrub and rested for a bit. We made sure to keep a good eye out for soldiers as well as horses. I did not want to have another conversation with Captain Torelli.

“We need to learn to morph coats,” Rachel said, rubbing her arms in the chill air. “Coats would make this so much better.”

“Shoes,” Jake said. “Forget coats, we need shoes.”

“Yeah, well, you're a boy. Boys are, like, made of fire or something. You're warm all the time.”

“Uniforms,” Marco said decisively for about the billionth time. “Shoes and coats are impossible dreams. But uniforms? We can do uniforms. At least team colors or something. A logo.”

“Being more recogniseable isn't a good thing, Marco,” I pointed out.

“Right, because a bunch of teenagers in various shades of spandex isn't already recogniseable. We're practically invisible here, but add some coordination and we'll suddenly stand out.”

“The Star Defenders have uniforms,” Rachel said thoughtfully.

“I was thinking more X-Men than Sailor Scouts,” Marco said.

“I think you'd look cute in a little skirt and bow, Marco,” Rachel said sweetly.

“Maybe we should morph soon?” I pointed out, eyeing the four shoeless kids dressed in spandex, the blue deer-scorpion-centaur alien with no mouth, and the large, out-of-place hawk hanging around in the middle of the Dry Lands. “Marco's right about one thing – we _are_ kind of recogniseable.”

“Time, Ax?” Jake asked.

<It is nine o-clock, Prince Jake.>

“Nine of what clock?” Marco asked innocently. “One of our clocks?”

We all ignored him. I focused on the horse within me.

My shoulders stretched, bulged, as muscle crawled down them, then down my torso and over my hips. My bones lengthened, thickened. My spine clicked and suddenly, I couldn't stand properly upright any more. Fingers merged together and my elbows and wrists both migrated higher up my arms; tows merged together and my ankles and knees migrated further up my legs.

My skeleton seemed to be staying basically intact for this particular morph. That was something, at least.

My hair flattened, softened, and began to creep out, sprouting over my face, my chest, my forelegs. Most of my toe and finger bones migrated further up into my arms and legs and shrivelled. By the time the hair reached my toenails, they'd merged into hooves. A mohawk of longer, stiffer hair crept down my head just as my tail shot out of my spine. My teeth grew, my face lengthened.

If you think that horse morph is weird, try to imagine a red-tailed hawk turning into a horse. Tobias somehow managed to keep his feathers until the very end and everything.

We ambled casually out from behind the boulders; me, a shortish back mare; Ax, a stocky gray; and Tobias, a tall chestnut. Tobias was clearly the oldest, and Midnight's instincts were happy to let him take the lead.

I like horse morph. Horses can't fly like an osprey, and they can't run as well as a wolf. They don't have excellent sight or smell. But Midnight was my first ever morph. The first time I felt my body shift and melt into something new, it was into that of a horse. The horse I was at that moment. A lot of my morph experimentation had been done with the horse. It was familiar, sort of habit-forming. When I morphed osprey, I was prepared for scouting. When I morphed wolf, I was prepared for battle. When I morphed horse, I was prepared to play with the awesome gift that Prince Elfangor had given us, to explore what it could do and what it could mean, without any immediate war-related pressure.

Of course, right then, I _was_ using the horse morph for the war. But the feeling remained.

After rolling around in the dust for a bit to give ourselves that 'living in the wild' look, we found the modest horses and fell into step with them. There were a few actual horses with them, and they sniffed at us suspiciously, but the horse-Controllers totally ignored us. They didn't seem to care about our presence at all, which was suspicious behaviour in its own right since there should be some basic social protocols to observe. I relaxed and let Midnight's instincts do all the thinking, since the horse brain wanted to stay with the other horses anyway.

<Okay,> Rachel reported from the sky, <Cassie, you've got Jake and Marco incoming, so don't... breathe them in or crush them or whatever.>

<All aboard the Pony Express,> Marco said as something tickled my face.

Rachel was an owl, watching from the air. Jake and Marco had morphed something a little less obtrusive in case we needed to get inside any buildings or anything. They were flies. I felt them alight on my left nostril.

We wandered towards the base, doing horse things. The signs warning us that we were entering a restricted area got more and more intense. The last one actually said YOU MAY BE SHOT. We ignored it. Our little herd of horses, some with aliens in their heads, some with alien technology letting them be horses in the first place, moved on, right into the heart of the mysterious Zone 91.


	13. Chapter 13

I was beginning to think that maybe we should've all just been owls. They see so much better at night, and nobody was looking up. But a lot of perspectives is always a good thing, I guess.

Men and women moved around us, many of them carrying machine guns. They ignored us. Nobody cared about a bunch of wild horses.

All the squat concrete buildings were shut up tight, and the horse-Controllers were showing no interest in them. We'd been right, then – the yeerks weren't dumb enough to try to break into buildings as horses. Whatever they wanted would be out in the open. Whatever they wanted was probably coming in on a truck.

We had no idea what they wanted, or what they were going to do when it showed up.

It couldn't be too dramatic, though. Horses didn't have hands, so it couldn't be a matter of operating complex machinery. Horses didn't stand a chance against machine guns, so they couldn't be trying to steal something. It had to be a scouting mission. It had to be.

I really, really hoped that it was just a scouting mission.

The clock ticked on. The guards around us grew more alert.

<Do you guys hear that?> Rachel asked.

<No. What is it?>

<Engines.>

Eventually, the engines came close enough that we, too, heard them. Two big, long trucks motored through the base. Our herd followed them. The guards ignored us. They'd seen horses hundreds of times.

The gray stallion kept pace with the lead truck, running alongside. The othser Controllers fanned around the two trucks. We cantered to keep up, sticking with the real horse as much as possible.

A siren started blaring from somewhere. I looked left and right, but none of the military personnel we saw seemed concerned. The trucks approached a large concrete hangar, which began to open. That must be what the siren was for.

<They're going to unload the trucks within the hangar,> I said. <That could be a problem.>

<Yeah,> Tobias agreed. <It's a problem for the yeerks as well. And they don't have backup.>

The soldiers, clearly interested in saving time, unlocked the backs of the trucks as the hangars opened. Doors swung wide. We guided Jake and Marco inside, one to a truck.

The gray stallion was nervous. He looked at the roan mare and tossed his head, a signal that clearly meant something to the other controllers. She shook her head in a very human way. He snorted.

Small things were being pulled out of the trucks just outside the hangar. Cardboard boxes, strange shapes under tarps. There was something bigger in the lead truck, much bigger. And square. And shiny.

<Guys?> Marco said. <There's a thing in here. It feels funny.> He was in the lead truck.

<Funny?> Jake asked.

<Like... tingly-funny?>

<Like a microfluctuating organised electrical field?> Ax asked.

<Ax, I have no idea what that is.>

The trucks pulled ahead, moving into the hangar.

The horse-Controllers charged.

A lanky chestnut barrelled into a woman with a machine gun. An older black took out her partner on the other side of the truck. The gray stallion, with a handful of horse-Controllers and a couple of real wild horses in his wake, charged forward into the hangar, toward the trucks.

What could we do? We followed.

Three Animorphs cantered forward, keeping pace with the wild hangers-on. It was nice to have somebody around who knew less about what was going on than we did for once, even if that somebody was a small herd of horses.

Well, the military personnel also knew less than us about what was going on.

“What the – ?!”

“They're just horses! Something must have spooked them!”

“We're under attack by horses! Shoot!”

“Don't shoot, you'll hit the device!”

“Help, I'm allergic to horses!”

And so on.

The yeerks didn't know which truck whatever they were looking for was in, but we had a pretty good idea. They split up to check both. We let them clear the way and dashed for the lead truck, with Marco's 'tingly-funny' device. I leapt into the back of the truck, shouldered the roan mare aside, and stared.

It was big, and a little bit shiny, with rounded corners. Somewhat like a huge, vaguely cubic egg. There was a plate along the front of it, constructed of some kind of material I couldn't identify, with strange designs on it. I stared at them, trying to remember if I'd seen anything like it before. A wave of dizziness overtook me, and I stumbled backwards out of the truck, nearly falling.

<Cassie!> Tobias was there, pushing his side against mine, giving me something to lean on.

<Cassie?> Jake said. <Is she alright?>

<I'm fine, I'm fine,> I said quickly, pushing images of distances and shapes and data that I didn't understand to the back of my mind. There were more important things to worry about. <I have no idea what that is, though.>

Ax was on my other side. He looked into the truck and gave a dismissive snort. <Perhaps we should leave before these soldiers figure out whether or not they wish to use their weapons.>

<We can't leave,> I said. <The yeerks are still here. They might... do something.>

<Well, absolutely nothing is happening in here,> said Jake from the back truck. <I'm going to put on some bigger wings in case you guys need more aerial support than Rachel can provide.>

The gray stallion joined the roan in the lead truck. A soldier pointed a machine gun at me, only to have a horse-Controller knock him over. If we'd been an actual threat, we'd all be long dead... but we were horses. Acting weird, perhaps, but still. Horses.

The soldier stood up again, looking kind of annoyed. But he didn't shoot anyone.

The gray and the roan backed out of the truck. Instantly, other horse-Controllers were all around them, nickering, snorting.

The pair remained silent. Realisation dawned.

<They don't know what it is either,> I said. <They have no more idea than we do.>

Other Controllers tried to look in the van. Several managed a glimpse before the military personnel started herding us all out. But none of them seemed very happy or excited about it. They just shook their heads and snorted.

Some people had shown up to herd us all out. We went. Controllers, Animorphs, normal horses; as one, we trudged off out of the base, out into the Dry Lands.

We did a quick roll call to make sure everyone was with the group and explained exactly what had happened to Jake, Rachel and Marco. Jake and Rachel swooped above us as owls. Marco settled on my ear, still a fly.

<So,> Marco said, <just to be clear – there is fancy alien tech at Zone 91. The yeerks planned this big scouting mission with horses to find it. They succeeded. But they have no more idea what it is than we do?>

<That seems to be the case,> Tobias said.

<It didn’t look like a spaceship,> Rachel said. <But it was definitely something alien.>

<Yeah, but what?> I said. <If the yeerks don’t know, and we don’t know, and probably the scientists back at the base don’t know, then what’s the point?>

<"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Shakespeare,> Tobias said. <Every conspiracy nut in the world is obsessed by what’s back there in that hangar. We saw it, and we don’t even know what it is.>

<Actually...> Ax began. Then he stopped.

<Actually, _what? > _Rachel pressed.

<Oh, well... I sort of know what it is. It’s kind of...>

<Look!> I yelled. Something was swooping in fast across the darkening desert. It flew along the ground, just inches above the scattered scruffy trees. It churned up the dust as it came. It was smallish, no bigger than a large human fighter plane. But it was shaped like a streamlined, headless beetle. There were long, serrated points aimed straight forward on either side. <Bug fighter!>

I had to resist the urge to run. That was only natural. I could smell fear cascading off the horse-Controllers. That fear told me what to expect before I felt my own dread and terror grip me, a familiar oppressive aura beyond my control.

<Okay, I don't see much but I can feel _tha_ t,> Marco complained. <Why does Visser Three have to show up at every single mission? Isn't he meant to be leading an invasion? That dude seriously needs to learn to delegate.>

<I can’t believe the radar back at the base doesn’t pick that up,> Tobias said as the fighter came in to land.

<Radar. Is that the human tool that bounces radio beams off objects? I don’t mean to offend, but any andalite child could build a radar-cloak from the pieces of his toys.>

<Somehow you are grinding my nerves, Ax,> Rachel said grumpily. <And that’s supposed to be Marco’s job.>

Because we didn't seem to have learned not to push our luck, we followed the horse-Controllers around the back of the rocks. The Bug fighter was waiting there, already on the ground. But the door didn’t open until the horse-Controllers were assembled before it. A hork-bajir stepped out, glanced around. Nodded and called something back at the ship.

Then Visser Three stepped out, his andalite gait dainty compared to the horses. He almost looked harmless, except for the tail, and that creeping sense he projected that everything still alive was only so because he hadn't got around to killing it yet.

I _had_ to learn how to do that.

<Report,> he said in a tone of complete casualness. <Did you sight the object?>

For somebody incapable of speaking or making most kinds of meaningful gestures, the stallion did pretty well at communicating. He nodded his head in an exaggerated movement, once.

<Is it useful to us? Do we need to pick it up right now?>

The stallion hesitated. He pawed at the ground uncertainly.

Visser Three narrowed his eyes. <It is a simple question. Can this wait until you are in a form better able to explain thoroughly? Or is it useful to us, and does it need to be captured now?>

The stallion snorted. Shook his head uncertainly.

Suddenly, Visser Three's tailblade was at his throat. The stallion froze.

<You seem confused, Jillay Nine-Two-Six. Did you penetrate the facility, yes or no?>

The stallion nodded.

<Did you sight the object?>

He nodded again.

<Is it of non-terrestrial origin?>

Another nod.

<Is it of use to us?>

The stallion hesitated.

<Do you know what it is?> Visser Three looked up. <Any of you?>

Trembling with fear, the stallion gave a shake of his head. Visser Three twitched his tail, and the stallion no longer had a head.

<Fools! Idiots! Incompetents!> the Visser screamed in enraged thoughtspeak. <Weeks have been wasted setting up this effort. First we lose that clumsy fool, Korin Five-Four-Seven, when he was bitten by a snake. And now we’ve lost poor JillayNine-Two-Six!> The Visser indicated the no-longer-in-one-piece horse-Controller, like it had been someone else’s fault he’d been lost. <And now you don’t even know what you saw?! You are supposed to be experts! You were supposed to be prepared for this mission. And you are telling me that after all this carefully laid groundwork, after all this effort, you have rendered the entire mission moot by not being prepared for your jobs?>

For a while no one moved or spoke or even breathed. No one, me included, wanted to take any chance of attracting the furious Visser’s attention. Then he said, <All right, I’ve punished the one responsible. Transport will come for the rest of you. We will need to initiate the backup plan. It is more complicated, but it may reap more future rewards anyway. Have you idiots at least identified the right targets to infest?>

The roan mare nodded, looking happy to be able to report good news for once.

<Good. Then you can live. We’ll initiate the plan tomorrow.> Suddenly he stopped. <Those horses. What are they doing with you? They are not our people.>

I expected it to be kind of hard to explain horse herding behaviour without language, but the roan simply snorted and tossed her head dismissively. The Visser, however, narrowed his eyes. He aimed his stalk eyes directly at me. <Fool, do you not realize that the andalite bandits who plague us can morph any animal they like, including horses? I will have to kill these creatures, just to be sure.>

<No one move. No one act like they heard anything,> I hissed to the others. I lowered my head and crunched up a mouthful of grass. And then I did what horses do. And I wasn’t modest about it.

The Visser laughed derisively. <I suppose they are real horses, after all.>

I took a relieved breath.

<Still, better kill them.>

<Uh-oh,> I said.

The hork-bajir warrior leveled his Dracon beam at us. A second hork-bajir came running from inside the Bug fighter.

The horse brain didn't know what was going on, but I was scared. And the horse knew how to react to fear.

Tobias whinnied a warning call and Animorphs and wild horses alike responded instantly. The biggest, oldest horse among us, a muscular chestnut with gray in her mane, put herself between us and the strangers as the rest of us bolted. Horses are fast, but so are hork-bajir, and to be honest, I had no idea how long a hork-bajir could run. The pair were right behind us. They raised their Dracon beams as they ran.

It's really hard to shoot straight while running, so they had to pause to take their shots. By then, the lead mare was running with us, but her defiance seemed to make her a target. Apparently assuming that any horse that would stand up to them must be an andalite bandit, they focused their fire on her. The smell of burning horse flesh filled my nostrils, her screams filled my ears; I used the fear to push myself harder, faster.

Sudden hork-bajir screams of surprise and pain indicated Rachel and Jake's arrival on the scene. Owls are almost totally silent on the wing. In the darkness, they are virtually undetectable. The hork-bajir were taken completely off-guard.

I didn't turn to watch. I ran. Dry earth under my feet, wind in my mane, the open plain before me, I ran.

Lights appeared up ahead and resolved into headlights. Humvees, coming to investigate the racket. We were still very close to the base. I began to relax, just a little. The yeerks wouldn't risk hork-bajir getting spotted. They'd have no choice but to withdraw.

When we were sure we were safe, we slowed to a trot, then a walk.

<We have been in morph for a little over a hundred of your minutes,> Ax informed us.

<Right,> Jake said. <Demorph time. Let's go bird and get home before our parents find out we're missing.>

We demorphed. We went bird. We endeavoured to get home before our parents found out that we were missing.

<Well, that was stupid from start to finish,> Rachel said as we got far from Zone 91. <We could have gotten killed. And for what? Over something even the yeerks don’t recognize.>

<Whatever that thing is, it sure doesn’t look like a spaceship,> I added. <It did something weird to my brain, though. Did anybody else get that?>

<Oh, yeah,> Tobias said. <That thing was hard to look at. Maybe it _is_ a weapon. >

<It's not human,> Jake said with the mental equivalent of a shrug. <So who knows?>

<I hope not,> Rachel moaned. <Can you imagine if the Air Force figure out how to use it?>

<It is not a spaceship,> Ax said. <Or a weapon. But it is also _not_ human.>

<Well, I guess we’ll probably never find out what it is,> I said with a sigh.

<Why won’t you find out?> Ax asked.

<Because it’s not worth risking our lives again,> I said. <If the yeerks don’t even know what it is.>

<Of course the yeerks don’t know what it is,> Ax said calmly. <They have never been aboard an andalite Dome ship.>

There were several long seconds of silence.

<Ax, are you telling us you do know what that thing is?> Tobias asked.

<Of course. I started to tell you, but we were interrupted.>

<So? So what is it?> Marco demanded.

<It’s a disposable module of a type used in the old days on the first generation of andalite Dome ships. When the modules were used up, they were jettisoned into space. They were supposed to be aimed toward a star, so they’d be burned up without a trace. This one must have drifted through space, eventually being caught by Earth’s gravity.>

<So it’s a space engine?>

<It’s a weapon?>

<No, of course not. It’s... well, this is a bit embarrassing. It’s an andalite Dome ship’s modular waste disposal system.>

For about a full minute, no one said anything. Then Marco spoke.

<You’re telling me that all that security out there, all that mysterious Air Force secrecy, is hiding the secret of an andalite _toilet? >_

<Only a very primitive model,> Ax said condescendingly. <Since those days there have been huge technological improvements.>

<Oh, right,> Marco replied. <It’s a good thing they don’t have one of the modern, super-advanced toilets. That would be a disaster.>

I figured it would probably be really intrusive of me to ask if andalites even pooped. Their whole digestive system made no sense to me whatsoever. Absorbing grass juice through hooves? How could that possibly give them enough nutrients?

But flying over the Dry Lands was no time to worry about alien biology. We were all tired and stressed and needed to get home after a hard day defending the earth from alien toilets.

Sometimes I think my life is kind of weird.


	14. Chapter 14

Somehow, no matter how much I tried to understand, my life just kept getting weirder.

Take the andalite toilet, for instance. I was no astrophysicist. But even I knew that space was big. Insanely big. And mostly empty. A module designed to be jettisoned missing its target star, sure enough. But hitting another body? A populated body? That seemed really, really unlikely. And an andalite artefact coming here, to earth, at a point in time where both andalites and humans would be around to recognise it?

No. No, that, I didn't believe. Not for a second. Andalites lived far away. Very far away. 'Reinforcements could take one to two years' kind of far away, even with their superfast, practically magical space travel technology. And they travelled even farther. It was much, much too big of a coincidence. The only way that it made any sense whatsoever was if a Dome ship had been near Earth when it jettisoned the toilet. Even aiming for our own sun, that was a really small chance. It was more an 'in orbit around earth when damaged and lost the module' kind of chance.

Elfangor's Dome ship had been near Earth, obviously. They'd been fighting near our moon. And we knew that wreckage from that ship could fall to Earth, because the very dome that Ax was in had done so. But Ax had specified that the toilet was an old model. Meaning it would have come from an older generation of Dome ship. The way he'd said it suggested it was probably before his time. Which meant...

Which meant that andalites had been in the vicinity of Earth before. Which meant that, assuming I was right about the module ending up on Earth being ridiculously unlikely even if it had been aimed at our own sun, andalites had done more than simply passed close by before. They'd either had some kind of incident that damaged their ship, or they'd been hanging around for awhile. Anything else was just too unlikely.

Which left a couple of really important questions.

How long had yeerks been on Earth, with the andalites fighting them?

If the yeerks hadn't been on earth that long – and I didn't think they had, because we would've lost the planet long ago – then what were andalites doing near our planet?

I agreed with Rachel – Earth probably wasn't the McDonald's next to the highway of the galaxy. Ax seemed to find us technologically primitive and culturally mediocre. The yeerks seemed mostly interested in our numbers and ability to survive in such varied conditions. With the obvious exception of grease, salt and cinnamon buns, I couldn't really see anything on Earth that would warrant andalite attention before the yeerks showed up.

I tried to memorise my reasoning as I flew. I would need to write it all down later.

First, though, I had to get inside and just generally be present around my parents.

They were waiting for me in the kitchen.

They had their angry-parent faces on.

“Where were you?” Mom asked.

Mom always takes the lead in discipline. She thinks my dad gives in too easily. She thinks she's tougher. She thinks this because it happens to be true.

I glanced at my dad, but his expression was steel as well. That wasn't good.

I swallowed. “I was out with Rachel,” I said, which was more or less true.

“Out with Rachel?” Mom asked. She wasn't shouting, but she might as well have been. She stood up. My mom isn't tall, but she can give that impression when she wants to. “Out with Rachel where?”

I looked away. “Around,” I mumbled.

“Where. Were. You. Young. Lady?”

“At the mall.”

“The mall?” Dad asked. He spoke quietly. Calmly. Seriously. “Did you meet Helen there?”

Something cold seemed to trickle down my spine. “She called you.”

“Yes. She did.”

“In the Dry Lands, Cassie?” Mom was shouting by then. “At nearly midnight? When they're putting that new military base out there?!”

“I was with – ”

“Rachel is a white girl,” my mother snapped, “with a lawyer for a mother and a semi-famous television presenter for a father. If you two are caught together, you are _not_ both in the same situation. We've discussed this before.” She sat down heavily and lowered her head into one hand. It had been a long time since I'd seen her that angry. That scared. That worried.

I knew fear, now. I knew worry. I worried about the other Animorphs all the time. I was afraid for my parents, my planet. It hurt to see it on her. And I'd put it there.

I looked away.

“Cassie,” Dad said. He spoke more quietly, more gently. But his voice was no less serious. “What were you doing out in the Dry Lands?”

I shrugged. “It just... seemed like somewhere new to hang out,” I said vaguely.

“Does this have anything to do with your environmentalism group?”

I stared at him. “What?”

“We had that... problem the other day. With the artillery shell, or whatever it was. When we went out for the horse. I don't suppose your group thought that this Air Force base might be a good environmental target?”

“What? No! No, Dad, it's nothing like that.”

“Cassie, we were happy to let you be involved in this group because we trust you to make good decisions. But with your grades falling, and now that you're refusing to see Dr Johnson, and now this... look, letter-writing campaigns and awareness and all that are really good things. But if you've been experimenting with more... active... activism – ”

“No, we... look, Dad, I know all about that stuff. About those sickos who firebomb testing labs and let lab animals go free to starve on the streets and who bully and harass scientists. We're _not_ like that. We don't do that kind of stuff, and we never will. I'm not... I'm not going all 'end justifies the means’ on animal rights or anything here. I swear.”

Dad looked a little relieved. “Then why were you out there?” he asked.

“Well, Jake thought – ”

Instantly, both of my parents' expressions changed. They exchanged a glance.

“Oh,” Mom said, a sweet tone creeping into her voice. “You were out with Jake?”

“She does seem to have him over a lot,” Dad said to Mom.

To me, Mom said, “You know we've discussed you dating. And we decided that you were still too young.”

"Dating?" I said weakly.

Mom sighed. Then she shook her head. "Maybe it’s time for us to have another talk about the birds and the bees."

I swear the blood drained out of my whole head. Then it came rushing back into just my cheeks and neck so that they burned. "Um... I’m not dating."

“It's nothing to be ashamed of,” Dad said gruffly. “You're a normal young girl, you have certain... interests, certain... fascinations, a natural... curiosity.”

At this point I wanted to dig a hole right through the linoleum and bury myself.

"All we’re saying is to be honest with us," Mom said, all stern again. "Do not make us worry about you."

“Perhaps we should have Jake's parents over,” Dad said thoughtfully. “To discuss the rules of their relationship. These late nights simply aren't acceptable.”

“It won't happen again!” I practically shouted. “Can I go now?”

I fled the room, dashing for the safety and privacy of my own. I could feel them laughing at me.

I would never, ever be able to look at them – or anyone – ever again without wanting to die. I just knew it.

At least they weren't asking too many questions.

Letting Crazy Helen contact them had been a mistake. I saw that now. We should've anticipated that she might call, should've given her a reason not to. Or at least asked her not to. Now they knew I'd been out in the Dry Lands at the exact same time that the mission had taken place – the mission that Visser Three knew the andalite bandits had been monitoring. The whole Zone 91 thing was probably a secret project, and even if my parents were Controllers, it was highly unlikely that they were involved or would know what had happened or when. Unlikely, but not impossible. I needed to be more careful. Too many coincidences like that and people started crunching the numbers.

I got out a pen and paper, and started to write down my inferences about the andalite toilet and what it meant for the history of Earth. I would've preferred to do so out under my tree, but leaving the house again that night sounded like a really bad idea. If my parents were Controllers, I didn't want them suspicious... and Controllers or not, I didn't want them worried about me. How terrifying would that be, to watch your daughter do things that you were sure would get her into trouble, and be unable to do anything about it because you were a slave in your own head? I'd always felt bad for people like Tom, watching helplessly through their own eyes as an invading force tried to steal their friends and family as well. But it must be extra bad for a parent, being responsible for the safety and wellbeing of somebody else and being at the total mercy of a being who just doesn't care.

Like Chapman. He and his wife didn't know that Melissa was a Star Defender. Did she ever stay out late, fighting the good fight, and make them worried? Did they rail against the control of their yeerks, pleading with them to have a talk with her, to be the parents that they weren't letting the Chapmans themselves be, to make sure that she would stay safe?

I was getting off track. Really off track. The point of the paper was to keep my thoughts organised and keep a record of them. I wasn't supposed to let my mind wander like that.

Zone 91. A pointless waste of time for every single person involved. Captain Torelli guarded an artefact that he could neither understand nor use from an indifferent population that wouldn't believe it was from aliens anyway, while actual aliens who didn't know what it was laboured under the delusion that it might not be entirely useless, and a handful of kids with useful alien technology put themselves in the middle. What a mess. What a stupid, pointless mess.

I put the pen down, and went to spend some time with my parents.


	15. Chapter 15

Dad was out in the barn, but Mom was sitting in the living room, reading. I went over to her.

“Hi.”

She looked up, looking tired. Did she normally look that tired? “Hi, Cassie.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't... I don't mean to make you worry.” I swallowed. “Sometimes there's just stuff going on, and I'm never really sure about what to do...”

“It's hard to be a teenager. I remember.”

“I bet it's hard to be a mom, too.”

“Yeah. But the rewards are worth it.” She put the book aside and hugged me tightly, possessively. I hugged her back.

“How are you doing?” I asked. I'd never really spoken to Mom as much as I did with Dad. We got along fine, we just tended to have less to say to each other.

She shrugged. “Same old.”

“How's work?”

She frowned. “You want to know about my work?”

“Sure.” I sat down next to her. “Why not?”

“Stressful, to be honest. I've been working around the clock with all the animals.”

“Why? Some kind of disease outbreak?”

“No. It's much stupider than that.” She rolled her eyes. “Some company with a lot of money is having their annual outing at The Gardens, and they keep making outrageous demands. We're closing the park for their little get-together, so their coordinator has got it into his head that we're miracle workers. He wants me to 'make sure all the animals are active and well-behaved for the visit'. I tried to explain that they're animals, not robots, and they have their own sleep cycles and do what they want when they're awake, but...” she shrugged.

“Seriously? They said that?”

“Yeah.”

“Don't... don't they know _anythin_ g about animals?”

“Probably not. They're a construction company. Gondor Industries. I bet the only time they deal with animals is guarding against termite infestations. Apparently they think we can just stick the tiger in his cage tomorrow and make him entertain them on cue, no matter what mood he's in. I almost yelled myself hoarse on the phone trying to explain.”

Wait a minute. Tomorrow?

Tomorrow. Sunday. There'd been a sign-up sheet for a outing to The Gardens in the little office that Captain Torelli had stuck us in. For tomorrow.

Visser Three had said that they would enact their backup plan and infest some military personnel tomorrow.

“So,” I asked casually, “does that mean you need to work tomorrow?”

“Yeah. You know how these weekend events are. I mean, I'll probably only need to be there an hour or two. Why? Did you need me for something?”

“No. No, I'm fine.”

My mom probably wasn't in any danger. The yeerks weren't trying to take over The Gardens, they just wanted a handful of Air Force personnel. They were wasting time and energy on a project that they didn't realise was pointless. It wasn't a threat to the planet at large, or to us personally, although the yeerks moving into human military couldn't exactly be considered a _good_ thing.

Air Force personnel. Who probably had kids of their own at home. Who'd probably signed up to defend their country or support their families. Who could very well be aiming machine guns at us in the future, if the American military became heavily involved, helpless to do anything but watch as the aliens in their brains shot the people trying to protect them.

Not on my watch.

“I have school stuff to do tomorrow afternoon anyway,” I said. “I'll probably be busy all afternoon.”


	16. Chapter 16

I'd only glanced at the sign-up sheet in the base, but fortunately, it was really easy to get the schedule details for Gondor Industries off my mom. When she's frustrated by something, it's no trouble at all to get her to talk about it. Actually getting away was another matter. In the end, I had to wait until Mom went off to work, then headed out to fix the horse trough in our horse paddock which had broken a few days ago. If Dad noticed I was gone a little too long... well, I'd deal with that then.

I was going to end up grounded. How was I supposed to fight aliens grounded?

<Okay,> Tobias said as we swooped over The Gardens a mere five minutes before they were supposed to open (I wasn't the only one who'd had trouble getting away), <if they're doing it here, they basically have four areas of privacy. There's the service corridors between the animal enclosures, and the attached offices and soforth...>

<Unlikely,> Marco said. <People are moving through there all the time. We nearly got caught when we went in there.>

<All they need is one Controller here with an office,> I pointed out. <Of course, they'd then need to lure Torelli and anyone else they want into the office of their own free will, but he doesn't strike me as very imaginative.>

<Right,> Tobias said. <We have those offices, if they want to do it through the zoo part. If they're going through the theme park, they have the security building, and there are two rides with secluded parts – the log flume ride and the haunted house.>

<Cassie?> Jake said. <You know The Gardens best. What do you think?>

<The security building is nearly always occupied by at least three people,> I said thoughtfully, <so they can't go that way unless they've already got all the guards on duty. The log flume and haunted house don't stop for long enough in any given spot, but they could engineer a breakdown.>

<They do that on television all the time,> Marco agreed, as if that was somehow meaningful.

<So we have the log flume, the haunted house, and the service building for the animals,> Jake said. <Teams of two, then? Anybody got any preference?>

<I can't do the animal building,> I said quickly. <My mom is working today and she'll kill me if she sees me. My parents were not happy about how late I came home last night. Besides, this place is meant to be closed for this outing.>

<Cassie's parents know all of us from the 'environmental group',> Rachel pointed out. <That might be a problem.>

<They don't know me,> Tobias pointed out. <And they don't know Ax's parents. For all they know, his family could work for Gondor Industries.>

<Tobias and Ax on the building, then,> Jake said. <That way, if they need to be human, there shouldn't be any problems.>

<You could probably acquire any morphs you might need while you're there,> I told Tobias.

<Probably not a good idea,> Tobias said. <Like you keep saying, we don't know if there's a morph limit. If there is, and you guys hit it we'll need somebody who's got a few to spare. I should only acquire what I need.>

I think we both knew he was lying. I could understand why Tobias didn't want to morph more than he needed to – of all of us, he was the only one who'd had to face the consequences of the power. He was the only one who'd been trapped. And it was a miracle that he could morph again – a miracle that none of us expected to ever be repeated. Of course the concept must terrify him. If I'd drowned, and been resuscitated, and I knew that would never work again, I'd probably never get in the water again.

I could have pushed him. I could have tried to make him move past it. But what would that accomplish? Making a teammate hate me for no reason? Besides, I had no room to talk. I still hadn't acquired a battle morph. At least his fake-reason was still a good reason. What was holding me back? Nonsensical reluctance that I knew perfectly well was completely irrational.

<I want the haunted house,> Marco said quickly. <I love haunted houses.> He didn't say 'my fear of water has gotten much worse since becoming an Animorph and nearly dying in it so often', but I'm pretty sure that's what we all heard.

<I'll take the haunted house too,> Rachel said. <If trouble does occur, my battle morphs are kinda too big for the log flume, since it's really hard to get out of the carriages there.>

<Hey, if you want to be in the dark with me that badly, no need to make excuses,> Marco said.

<Cassie and me in the log flume, then,> Jake said quickly, before Rachel could reply. <The capture could take place at any time, so stay alert. And it's pretty much a given that at least some of the staff are compromised.>

Some of the staff were compromised. I hadn't even thought of that. That was something we'd need to keep in mind for future missions.

Before we split up, I spoke to Rachel privately. <I kind of have a small favour to ask.>

<What kind of a favour?>

<Well, a lot of people in this park know me. Not just people who work in the animal sections. It would be better if I could... disguise myself. Not _all_ the way, but... >

<Oh. Yeah, sure. You can just assume I'm ok with that from now on. I mean, so long as you don't use it for, you know, talking to my family or whatever.>

<Right. Thanks.>

I told Jake I'd meet him at the log flume, demorphed, and headed for the nearest bathroom. It was empty, and I barricaded the door with a rubbish bin to keep it that way.

Unfortunately, the spare clothes we'd stashed at The Gardens were hidden in the animal part, and I didn't dare go there to change. I was going to have to be a weird kid running around the place in a leotard. At least on the log flume I'd just look extra-prepared for water. I also wouldn't look quite like myself, so nobody could identify me.

I stared at my reflection in the mirror.

_You've gained weight! Are you trying to bulk up?_

Was I fat?

I twisted this way and that, trying to spy fat folds under my arms, under my neck, on my belly. I was pretty sure I was normal, for a teenage girl. I was a short, broad-shouldered farmhand, and you had to take these things into account. I mean, I was a lot stockier than Rachel. Even before Rachel had become fascinated with fashion and got swept up in a world of power-shopping, drooling boys, and high achievement, back when we were kids and used to chase lizards in the forest together (how long ago had that been? A year? Two?), she'd been the sweet little blonde kid made of finely crafted twigs and pixie dust and I'd been... me. Not that I minded. I was happy being the, well, the sidekick; I didn't want to spend hours a day worrying about my appearance and my huge circle of friends and if Hannah was putting me down behind my back to Emma or whatever labyrinthine social activities constituted a threat in Rachel's crazy world. And with the war, I mean, there was simply no way I'd be able to keep up with a network of non-Animorph friends like Rachel or Jake. I couldn't even keep my grades up as it was. I'd crash and burn. I would've crashed and burned in a week. My practical invisibility was an advantage.

I was wasting time thinking about it, anyway. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment and pushed such thoughts out of my head. I didn't need to be pretty or noticed, and anything else was pointless conceit – dangerous conceit. The body was just a vehicle for the mind. It didn't _need_ to be fancy.

When I was sure I had it under control, I focused on Rachel.

I had to be careful. Really careful. I wasn't trying to be Rachel. I was trying to achieve an effect kind of like what Ax called a _frollis_ manoeuvre (as I thought the word I moved my hands into the andalite sign for it, a habit I was trying to get myself into to learn the language better). Ax had performed the manoeuvre to create his human morph, by combining all our DNA to make a unique human form. I couldn't do that, but by partly morphing a human morph I did have, I could still make a unique form. Probably. I just needed to control the morph in a way that made the half-formed morph look, well, natural. No little black farm girl with long blonde hair and pale, manicured hands. I had to do things halfway.

I'd never tried that before. Even when I was combining animals, I'd always worked in discrete limbs and characteristics.

I watched my face change in the mirror, watched my nose lengthen and narrow, my jaw become more defined. I felt myself grow taller. My skin tingled, and I stopped the morph before it could become white. I focused again, this time concentrating on my hair, which shot out of my head in long strands. I stopped the morph again and examined myself in the mirror.

Not bad. Rachel-Cassie had a more nicely defined face than I normally did, with thin lips and wide eyes, but her features weren't as fine as Rachel's. Her hair reached almost down to her waist, and it was more relaxed and less frizzy than my own, but still looked kind of natural. Her fingers and toes were long and slender and her nails were evenly filed. Nobody would recognise her. Nobody.

I looked around the bathroom until I found a lost hairtie and pulled my hair back in a long ponytail. It had been so long since I'd been able to wear a ponytail. I'd cut my hair short awhile ago because long, frizzy hair was a nightmare to deal with and I was sick of needing chemicals and fancy treatments just to approach a-little-below-average. (Cutting it off had gotten me a lot of compliments, so I assumed everybody else had been as sick of it as I was.) But sometimes I missed having longer hair. And I'd never gotten to have hair anything like as long as Rachel's. I flashed myself a smile in the mirror and headed for the log flume.

I was having a little trouble walking. Not serious trouble, more like when I'd tried on platform shoes for the first time for a costume party. It took me a couple of minutes to realise what was going on; I was taller, my weight distribution had changed, and my center of gravity was off.

That had never been a problem with a morph before.

It must be because I was only partially morphed. Maybe the muscle memory stuff settled in last, probably with the instincts. That would make sense. I'd need to test it a few more times to see if it was always true, but for now, I filed the information away.

Jake was waiting for me at the log flume. He eyed me as I approached, as if I was somebody really familiar whose name he'd forgotten. Then he noticed my leotard, and his eyes widened.

“Hi,” I said. “I didn't want anyone to recognise me. This wouldn't fool my mom, but the people who work in this part of the park...” I shrugged.

“Good idea,” Jake said. He was trying not to stare at me. It occurred to me that the form probably weirded him out. I mean, looking at Ax in human morph was weird sometimes. At first he just looked like a cute, vaguely familiar guy, but then it was like, 'hey, those are my ears!' Seeing a blend of myself and his cousin had to be strange.

But all he said was, “Maybe we should all get a human morph and learn that trick. You know, in case we need to be human without being identifiable. Is it hard to do?”

“It's a little tricky, yeah,” I shrugged. We were at the front of the cue for the log flume. I paid for a ticket with money from my sleeve and Jake produced some from somewhere under his shirt. It was hard to morph with more than a few dollars, but it's not like we ever tended to have more than a few dollars anyway.

We climbed into seats on the flume and strapped ourselves in. The seats fit two people per row, so we jumped in next to each other, military personnel and their families jumping in front and behind us.

I wished I had a good memory for faces. We couldn't be sure about the families, but the military guys, at least, weren't infested yet. They were potential allies. Assuming we could save them.

It was kind of hard to tell who the personnel were, anyway. They weren't in uniform. A few of them stood around looking stiff or tense, but mostly, off the clock they were just people. A young man lifted a woman with braided hair off the ground and spun her, laughing. Who was the soldier? Him or her? Both? Not that it mattered, but I started guessing based on hairstyle. The people with the crew cuts and super-neat moustaches or who wore their hair in tight, symmetrical buns were probably military.

Our log was dragged up along the track of the chain lift, giving it a little momentum and altitude before being released into the ride proper. I tried to lean forward and study the area. The tunnel was the important thing; the tunnel ahead of us, where the log would be plunged briefly into darkness. There were some people hanging around it, looking tense and alert, but they could just as easily be soldiers. The people we needed to worry about would either be in the ride with us, or lurking inside the tunnel itself. The yeerks would need to stop the log in that tunnel, do their infestation, and get it moving again.

On soldiers. In the dark. And if they were showing any discrimination, they'd need to do it to _specific_ soldiers without alerting other soldiers.

Presumably, the yeerks had night vision equipment. So did we, in the form of owl eyes or echolocation, although it occurred to me that my half-morph disguise, which had seemed clever at the time, sort of left me at a disadvantage there; I would need to demorph before morphing anything. My eyeballs I was pretty sure were still my own, so I could get owl-sight in a hurry, but if we needed to fight...

We moved closer, closer to the tunnel, and then suddenly, we were in darkness. The log moved along its slightly downward-sloping track, dragged by water flow and gravity, occasionally bumping into the sides. I felt Jake's hand in mine and gave him a little squeeze. Then I focused on the owl.

Shapes jumped out at me in the scarce light of the tunnel. The walls themselves, smooth and a little too close. The log in front of me, rocking unevenly in the water as we drifted along. Jake, his mouth half-twisted into a beak and feathers sprouting along his head as he used the same trick as me. But nobody outside the log.

The people in the log with us were calm and patient. The couple behind us were kissing with rather more intensity than most people do in public, and I looked away; it was a private scene, meant to be concealed by darkness. The light at the end of the tunnel approached, illuminated us; I struggled to demorph the owl eyes without demorphing Rachel.

Yeah, this whole disguise thing had not been well thought through.

“We're doing this wrong,” Jake said, very quietly, as we continued to drift along the water track.

“How so?”

“There's nobody set up in the tunnel for a grab. Meaning that if they're using this ride, they're going to send their guys in on the ride and have them ambush targets inside. That's the smart thing to do. Then they can spring the trap on specific targets they've identified, without waiting around for other people to see them.”

An image of Controllers walking around with spare yeerks in their pockets flashed in my mind, and I nearly laughed. But I saw what Jake meant. “We're only going to catch them if we're on the same specific run of the ride as a target.”

“Meaning we either have to keep riding this thing all night, or sneak into the tunnel and stake it out ourselves.”

“Which of those do you think would attract the least atten – ” I was cut off by a sudden launch forward, reminding me how the ride ended, and how much I hated it.

The water track just... ended, right beneath us. We dropped, my stomach dropping faster.

“Aaaaah!” I screamed as we fell. I wasn't the only one.

I'd dropped out of yeerk ships and morphed in mid-air, catching air under my wings at the last moment to stop myself from splattering against the ground. I'd thrown my own body, my weak little human body, from a rooftop to a tree a stupid distance away with no practice while Controllers searched the premises, because a gymnast dressed as a sailor scout had told me to. I'd flown blind across a room, dodging wires in perfect darkness and navigating only by echolocation. You'd think I'd be able to handle a little artificial waterfall, right? You'd think all that stuff would make it easy.

It made it way worse.

For normal people, people who didn't fall to near-certain death on a semi-regular basis, a little log drop was exhilarating. For me, it was terrifying. I told myself that I wasn't about to die, that I wasn't in danger, that I was meant to be having _fun_ , as we rushed downward, then skidded out horizontally at the last moment in a huge splash of water.

Other people were screaming too, in excitement or joy. I just hoped I blended in with them.

Jake and I were both trembling rather violently as we stepped out of the ride, but we couldn't afford to break down, we couldn't afford to go into battle mode, and we definitely couldn't afford to morph. There was no danger. We were fine. We were fine. I reached for the confidence of Rachel, that awareness that was always alert for danger but never prepared to run from it, but it wasn't there – I was only partially morphed. Relying on that sort of thing would be kind of creepy anyway. Not to mention probably psychologically unhealthy.

Jake's hand gripped my wrist, his knuckles white. I put my free hand over his. We walked, as calmly as we could, away from the ride.

“Let's not keep doing the ride,” he mumbled.

“Good call,” I mumbled back.

Oh god, we were pathetic. It was a _theme park ride_. We were so pathetic.

It was then that I spotted a familiar face walk past, and suddenly, my disguise seemed like a good call. It would be really, really awkward if he recognised me.

“Jake,” I hissed. “That guy in the tie. He's Captain Torreli. The one who interrogated us.”

“Okay...?”

“Check out those guys behind him.”

Jake scanned the general park population, and froze. His grip loosened on my arm a little. There were a few people scattered among the crowd, hanging about and chatting or eating theme park junk food, whose manner was... well, if Jake and I hadn't spent so much time in the form of predators, we'd probably never have noticed it. But they were definitely stalking Captain Torreli. They were good at hiding themselves, but we'd been trackers too often to be easily fooled. Torreli had a small kid with him, maybe about six or seven years old, and the pair headed for the haunted house. A couple of people queued up behind him.

“He's got a kid with him,” I whispered. “A kid makes this so much more difficult.”

“I know,” Jake said tightly. “Find Ax and Tobias.”

Marco and Rachel were near front of the line for the thankfully very popular haunted house. Jake jogged over to have a chat with them, looking for all the world like a guy who'd just spotted a couple of old friends, admittedly one who was dressed in tiny bike shorts and an incredibly tight t-shirt who had spotted similarly dressed friends. We really did need to find a way to make our morphing clothing less conspicuous.

I dashed for the nearest bathroom, locked myself in a stall (careful to prop the main door open just a little), and demorphed. A couple of minutes later, I took to the sky on seagull wings and made my way toward the animal part of The Gardens.

I didn't know exactly where Ax and Tobias were, but fortunately, thought-speak has a pretty long (if frustratingly inconsistent) range. <Ax! Tobias! Are you guys there? It's the haunted house! We need you at the haunted house!>

<We're here and we're coming, Cassie,> Tobias reported.

<What shape are you?>

<Both human. But we're almost at – >

<I see you.> They were dashing quickly away from the animal exhibits, towards the haunted house. They'd be about five or six people behind Captain Torreli by the time they got there. They might make the same carriage.

But there was somewhat of a ruckus in the haunted house line when I got back to it. I landed on the roof and tried to piece together what was going on. Captain Torreli had spotted Rachel and Marco, and apparently recognised them. Several passing or queuing soldiers had neatly surrounded them, clearly with the intention of detaining them but somewhat reluctant to simply grab them while off-duty in a fairly public area. I had absolutely no idea whether Captain Torreli could detain them in such a situation, but the important thing was, it had delayed him from getting into the haunted house.

It also made Rachel and Marco the centre of attention.

Would the Controllers scattered about remember their faces? Would they find it suspicious? Probably not. They had absolutely no reason to connect a pair of errant teens to the andalite bandits. They were just a distraction, an obstacle. But if we kept being an obstacle, if we kept letting little things slip... over time, we could have a problem. Kids dressed in spandex hanging around whenever a yeerk project went wrong? That wasn't the kind of pattern we wanted them to notice. They'd already started preparing for animals, started keeping an eye out for birds. It's not like they didn't notice us.

Nothing could be done about it right then, though.

<Jake,> I asked. <What do we do?>

Jake scanned the air for me, seemed to decide that my precise location was irrelevant, and just gave a shrug. Seagull eyes aren't nearly as good as osprey or owl eyes, but they were perfectly fine for picking up obvious human body signals at reasonable distances. I saw Ax and Tobias jog up, Ax looking confused and Tobias out of breath, and Jake pull back to meet them. I dropped to the ground nearby. There were plenty of birds that hung around The Gardens for food, largely unafraid of humans.

Jake had explained the situation, very briefly, by the time I caught up. “What do you guys think?” he asked.

<They're keeping Captain Torreli off the ride,> I pointed out, causing both Jake and Ax to jump while Tobias indicated with a single raised eyebrow and a glance that said yes, geniuses, the random seagull was probably me, <so if we let this play out, we might be able to get him out of here uninfested.>

<Visser Three seemed really intent on this plan,> Tobias said, wisely keeping the suspicious yeerk speculation to thoughtspeak. <I don't think they're going to leave without completing their goal, even if they have to drag him off somewhere.>

<It is unlikely that this captain is the only target,> Ax added. Somewhere along the line he'd acquired some pink cotton candy, and was shoving it into his mouth as he thought-spoke. <Even if we draw him away, others will fall into this trap.>

“And we don't know who the others are,” Jake concluded in a whisper. “We need to spring this trap on Torreli and rescue him. Or stop it before they get anyone.”

<He has a kid with him,> I reminded everyone.

“Everyone who goes into a haunted house will have a kid with them,” Tobias said. “Grown-ups don't go to haunted houses. They just don't.”

“So we let him lock Rachel and Tobias in an office or something, then wait for him to get back to the line?” Jake asked. “I'd rather have both of them for this.”

<It might be too late to worry about that,> I said. Rachel and Marco were both being led away by soldiers, presumably to be locked in the security office as Jake had said. They weren't fighting, but Rachel raised a questioning eyebrow at Jake as they were led past.

“Tobias,” Jake muttered, “Tell them to break out as soon as it's safe to do so and come meet up with us. We're going in.”

Tobias relayed the message. Rachel gave a tiny smile and nod. The two were led away. For my part, I hoped that none of this ever, ever got back to my mom. At least she didn't know that Gondor Industries was in fact the air base I'd managed to convince her I hadn't tried to break into, but if she learned that my friends were hanging around The Gardens when they weren't allowed in...

Captain Torreli was at the front of the line, his kid pulling him into the carriage. He was right at the front and, if I'd counted right, my friends would be just able to slip into the back. Of course, Jake was the only one in his actual body and therefore able to morph; the rest of us would have to demorph first. Since Ax and Tobias used their normal bodies as their battle morphs, that wouldn't be such a problem for them if a fight broke out, but I was a seagull. A seagull is not a natural warrior.

I didn't bother with the little train. I just walked right into the haunted house, hoping no Controllers would notice me. I flapped my way down the hallway, listening carefully for any sign of life. If the yeerks were set up in there with night-vision equipment, I did not want to walk in on them as a seagull... and I definitely didn't want to start demorphing in front of them.

I was alone. I was definitely alone. I found somewhere relatively enclosed and off the tracks, and started to demorph.

My body expanded in size. My skin itched, and feathers disappeared. Things inside me clicked and shifted and rearranged. My beak melted into a mouth. My vision changed, the small amount of light I could see becoming less blue and more yellow.

Dim lights around me flickered on, enough to make out vague shapes.

Yeerks!

No... no, an automated system. The carriage was approaching. I could hear it rumbling down the track behind me somewhere. It needed to turn a sharp corner and move through a curtain to get to me, and by then, I'd better not be human. I focused on own eyes. I was getting pretty good at owl eyes; they were usually the first things to emerge. Everything jumped into bright, sharp focus; I was crouched below a rag and mask on an extendible arm that I was pretty sure was meant to look like a vampire, the track for the little train was about three feet to my right, and the sound of the train came closer, closer, creeping up behind me.

I focused on wolf.

Fur emerged first. Then my jaw lengthened, and teeth sprouted.

The little train pulled in behind me, and the vampire stick shot out with a prerecorded cackle. Startled, I spun to face the train.

“Cool!” a little kid gasped, pointing right at me. “A werewolf!”

Unimpressed adults. Excited kids. Jake, Ax, Tobias. Nobody was making any kind of suspicious move. I let the train pull ahead and followed it, letting my body go full wolf as soon as it was past.

To be honest, I wasn't entirely sure what the plan was. Just find the yeerk trap and... break it? That seemed to be the crux of most of our plans. But what then? The Visser wouldn't just give up. He didn't know that his goal was pointless, that the artefact he wanted to identify was of no use to him or to the human race. He would keep trying. A new day, a new trap. And we couldn't protect the staff of Zone 91 forever.

Or their kids.

I followed the train silently. My wolf morph was complete enough to get the instincts, but owl eyes didn't sync well with a wolf brain. Humans are visual creatures, and to my human mind the owl eyes were just 'sight, but better' – but wolves, while they could see fine, didn't depend on it quite like we did. After touch, sight was probably the most important sense to the average human. The wolf didn't really know how to deal with all the data the owl eyes were giving it. Not that that was a major problem. I wasn't trying to figure out compound eyes or anything. The confusion just... made me kind of nervous.

I tailed the train through a couple more very tiny rooms and down a narrow hallway. In each room, it stopped briefly and something jumped out or screamed or cackled. Then, in the third room, it didn't start again.

After about twenty seconds, people started murmuring nervously. After about twenty-five seconds, the automatic lights went out, and Jake, Tobias and Ax jumped out of the train. Under my guidance, they felt their way along into the previous room, announcing that they were going for help.

They were, of course, looking for a place to morph where Controllers wouldn't see them. I could see said Controllers; a couple of humans in big, bulky goggles, moving for the little train. Some hork-bajir (how did they get hork-bajir in there?!), prowling about the walls. The people in the ride couldn't see them in the dark.

“It's just part of the ride,” somebody said, slightly nervously. “An old 'pretend to break down' trick.” Nobody was panicking. That was good. I guess soldiers are made of stronger stuff than that, and kids, well, kids are kids.

One of the Controllers approaching the little train raised a Dracon beam and aimed it at Captain Torreli. With his other hand, he pulled a cylinder from his pocket, about the size of a thermos. I could guess what was inside it.

I couldn't wait any longer. I leapt for the Controller's arm, dragging the Dracon beam down and away from the passengers. He screamed, startled, and reflexively squeezed the trigger. My left front leg seized up, numb and unresponsive. Around me, Controllers noticed my presence, and leapt into action.

Three hork-bajir were on me, their bulky night-vision masks obscuring much of their expressions. One wolf, especially one injured wolf, is not a match for three hork-bajir. Strategy, I needed a strategy. Go for the night vision? Not an easy shot. Throat would probably be easier. I could do throat, but against three? Even one was dangerous for a lone wolf. Wolves are hunters, but they aren't fighters. And they don't usually work alone.

But mere seconds later, I wasn't alone. A tiger roar reverberated through the small space. In the little train, soldiers grabbed their children and pushed them down in their seats, shielding them with their own bodies. A couple seemed to reach for guns, and cursed quietly when they found their belts empty. Who brings a gun to a theme park? They wouldn't have been able to use them in the darkness, anyway.

Tiger to my right, andalite to my left. Ax's main eyes were weirdly shaped, small and round instead of wide almonds – owl eyes, like me. Jake was the same. Tobias didn't have an owl morph, so that leapt in behind them was pure hork-bajir. Hork-bajir see very poorly in low light.

<Tobias,> I said as I fell back and let Ax take my place in the fight, <Enemy two feet in front of you, back to you.>

Tobias' strike was neither elegant nor precise. It couldn't be; it was blind. But it bit deeply into the hork-bajir ahead of him, and when it spun, I grabbed its arm in my teeth and bit down. Tobias kept slashing; I kept biting. In a few seconds, he was down.

<Okay,> Tobias said as he felt about for the fallen hork-bajir's night-vision equipment, <so maybe I need an owl morph.>

There were more hork-bajir now, pouring in from either end of the track. Jake roared, I snarled, but they fought as silently as they could, not wanting to alert the soldiers who were mere feet away. A couple of them had gotten out of the train, bidding their children to stay put. That wasn't good, but there was very little I could do about it; I was trying to dodge hork-bajir blades.

A grizzly loped in, followed quickly by a gorilla. Excellent.

<Good to see you guys,> Jake said. <Cassie, try to get the soldiers out. Marco, keep the hork-bajir off Cassie.>

And right at that moment was when everybody panicked. Soldiers started shouting. Children started screaming. Something drew up fear and dread from deep within them. Something so familiar to me that it might as well have been a siren.

It was the personal aura of dread that settled around Visser Three.


	17. Chapter 17

The people who had gotten out of the train to investigate started to bolt, scooping up their children as they went. Others either leapt out or pushed themselves lower towards the floor, freezing. Captain Torreli got out and swept the darkness with his eyes as if willing it to retreat, reaching for a gun at his waist that wasn't there.

Controllers and Animorphs alike could feel the Visser's aura, but we knew what it was and how to handle it. None of us fled or cowered, although I really wanted to. A hork-bajir pulled Captain Torreli into her arms, ignoring his struggled and protests, and half-dragged him into the next room, clearly attempting to salvage the mission. Watching this scene cost me an ear as a hork-bajir blade swept down and scraped my skull.

<They've got Torreli!> I told the others. <They're dragging him into the next room!>

<Cassie, Ax, Tobias, get Torreli,> Jake snapped. <Everyone else, try to slow these hork-bajir down.>

We dashed after Torreli. One hork-bajir was no real problem for the three of us. The problem was what they was probably heading towards – Visser Three. Who would, of course, have his own guards with him.

If Captain Torreli ended up in the Visser's hands, we'd lost.

A hork-bajir lunged at me, carving a gash in my flank moments before a gorilla flung him physically across the room. A child dashed in front of me and smacked right into a plastic gravestone. The panicked soldiers and their families were becoming a serious obstacle, but the best thing I could do for them was get out of the way. I did. Limping, bleeding, with mobility in only two and a half legs, I followed Captain Torreli.

To his credit, Torreli was doing what would probably be a good job of defending himself if he were fighting a human. He drove one heel into the hork-bajir's groin and one hand into her throat as he was dragged through the next room. Ax and Tobias appeared next to me just as Torreli was dragged through another curtain, and as it was pulled back, we could see light.

Tobias pulled off his night vision equipment and Ax demorphed his eyes, but for a moment I was near-blinded as we stepped into a lit room. A prerecorded voice announced our doom as we charged in. I could see shapes, shapes that, a moment later, resolved themselves into more hork-bajir, more humans. And, at the far end of the room, one andalite.

We didn't stand a chance. Not a chance. Even if I hadn't been injured, even if Tobias hadn't been in a relatively new morph, even if we hadn't been so very close to so many innocent bystanders... three of us. Seven hork-bajir. Three humans. Visser Three. One hostage.

Not a chance.

We might – might – be able to retreat. But not with Torreli. And not without endangering the bystanders behind us. We'd lost. Torreli would be a Controller. His kid would lose a father, and so would an indeterminate number of other children. The yeerks would have an air base. All over a toilet! A stupid disposable toilet that had no use to them whatsoever, and that they just...

 _Interstellar chicken pox_ , I told myself.

<Ax,> I said. <I have a plan. We can still achieve our goal here.>

<What is your plan, Cassie?>

I told him, as quickly and briefly as I could. But in the few seconds since we'd entered the room, Captain Torreli had taken in the huge blade-covered dinosaurs, the blue scythe-tailed centaurs, the injured wolf, and the handful of people acting like everything was normal, and reacted.

Ignoring the telepathically projected fear and dread within him, he'd twisted in the hork-bajir's grip, slid one of her feet back with his own before she could react, and dropped, arms locked around the hork-bajir's. Right in front of me, right before my eyes, he rolled forward, flipping his captor.

The hork-bajir was a good seven feet tall, and easily four or five times Torreli's weight. And he rolled her right over his own body and slammed her head, driven by all that weight, hard against the ground. Her forehead blades gouged the hard floor a little.

I think it was general shock and disbelief that stopped any of the other Controllers from trying to stop him, or indeed doing anything at all as he turned and ran back towards the train, back towards his child. I, too, couldn't seem to make myself react. But Ax, who presumably wasn't aware that middle-aged men weren't supposed to be able to throw around hork-bajir like dolls, did react. As Torreli ran past, he stepped forward, putting his body between the Controllers and Torreli, shielding him.

And then he swept his tail back, clipped the side of the blade against Torreli's head, and knocked him unconscious.

<Visser,> he said, <we should talk.>


	18. Chapter 18

I was never part of Rachel's world of status and gossip, where queens could rise on the power of a new pair of jeans and fall under the blades of cutting rumor, but I'd seen her run it. I'd seen the mask of arrogance she could pull on and off, seen her use sarcasm like a scalpel when she had to, seen her convince people through the sheer force of her personality that she was a force to be reckoned with. I'd always admired her ability to do that, although I disapproved of actually doing it. I'd always looked up to the deft ease with which she could slip on that confidence and derision and make it a powerful weapon. I'd never seen anybody do it as well as Rachel.

Until that day in The Gardens.

I'd often thought of Ax as kind of a jerk, but given that he was an alien and I had no idea how to actually assess an andalite personality, I'd always given him a pass. His arrogance had always been a little irritating. But when it came to using that arrogance as a weapon, there was nobody, nobody, who could equal Ax. He and Rachel weren't even close to the same league. Comparing Rachel to Ax in that regard was like comparing a cap gun to a nuclear bomb. Ax took the situation and, with every word, with every movement, with every expression, it was his.

It was a beautiful thing to watch.

<Visser,> Ax said, <we should talk.>

<It's the child again,> Visser Three responded derisively. <Perhaps you should leave the talking to your elders, hmm?>

<My uncles would not stoop to deigning to speak with an abomination such as yourself,> Ax replied with even more derision. < _My_ name is _aristh_ Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, brother of War-Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul. > He whipped his blade forward in a flourish and brought it to rest over his right shoulder.

The Visser's main eyes were on Ax, but he spared one stalk eye for us and one for his own forces. They made no move, and he gave them no order to do so. The hork-bajir that Captain Torreli had flipped remained motionless on the floor, probably not dead but definitely unconscious. Behind me, I heard the other Animorphs arrive, and heard Tobias quickly explain what was going on and warn them not to interfere. I kept one eye on Torreli. I couldn't very well rush forward and check his vitals, but I could see that he was at least breathing. I'd taken Ax to the library a couple of times to check out books about humans, and some of those books had been about human biology, including human brain structure. They were beyond my ability to understand, but Ax was pretty confident that he could knock people unconscious with minimal risk of permanent damage.

I didn't believe him. Not counting sleep, humans fell unconscious when something was seriously wrong. The longer Torreli lay there, the higher the chance that Ax had really hurt him. And there was nothing I could do for him, nothing to do but watch Ax try to talk our way out of this.

Visser Three cocked his head at Ax. He whipped his tailblade forward, too. <So you wish to do this now, _aristh_ Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill? >

<Regrettably not.> Ax's mental voice was practically a drawl. <That time and place will come – soon – but not today. Today, I am here to negotiate with you.>

<Negotiate?> the Visser crinkled his eyes in an andalite smile, full of amusement but devoid of joy. <I hold all the cards, little _aristh_. Your forces cannot hope to defeat mine. We could overwhelm you now and take the human. And even if you threaten to kill him like last time... well, we will find another target. There are plenty about. >

Everything about Ax's posture suggested that he was being forced to suffer a complete idiot. It was the sort of posture a waitress wears when a customer demands to know why his cheese isn't dairy free. <That may be the case, Visser, but there are dozens of panicked witnesses on this contraption. They have not seen anything yet, but they very easily could. If we engage, this fight will spill out into the open air. And while humans are very good at inventing fictions to hide the truth from themselves, while such a minor breach is not a problem in and of itself, how many minor breaches can you afford before even these creatures start to get suspicious? It is better to avoid such things altogether, is it not?>

<If you think I would hesitate to kill all of you and any witnesses, you are mistaken. Humans die very easily.> But he looked uncertain.

<Yes, I'm sure such a death toll would contribute wonderfully to your secret invasion. You do realise that if humans keep dying here, they will all simply move away?>

The Visser narrowed his eyes. <What could you possibly have to offer us in exchange for your lives and the lives of the locals in this park?>

<Information. We will tell you the nature of the device in Zone 91. You allow this Torreli human, and your other targets, to leave uninfested – nobody will believe what he has seen. We will tell you what the device is. Your forces and ours will both henceforth leave Zone 91 alone.>

<This is clearly an obvious trick to keep our hands off a valuable weapon,> Visser Three replied. <Your efforts here indicate its value. You have achieved the opposite of your goal.> He shifted his weight into a more battle-ready stance. Any moment, he would order an attack.

Ax's mental voice cut in before he could give the order, practically oozing contempt. <The whole purpose of our second clause is to prove to you that the item has no value,> he explained very slowly, as if trying to explain advanced physics to a small child. <You know us better than that. You know that if that artefact was an alien weapon, or engine, or anything with any value whatsoever, we would not allowed to leave it in the hands of humans. Or do you accuse us of breaking Seerow's Kindness?> This last sentence was a venemous challenge, a mental hiss.

But the Visser smiled the way andalites do, triumph in his eyes. I didn't understand what he thought he had won, and neither, it seemed, did Ax, whose own mask slipped to reveal the slightest unease. The Visser's smile grew.

<It is an andalite device, then,> he said, <if Seerow's Kindness is relevant. I can infest one of the witnessing hosts and identify it myself from their memories.> The smile grew cold. <You have nothing to offer.>

Ax recovered beautifully, superior irritation creeping back into his mental voice. <We have the information that your plan is pointless,> he said. <Confirm my words with host memories if you wish. It makes no difference to the fundamental point of this exchange, which is that conflict over the device is pointless. We are here to protect these humans. You are merely making a fool of yourselves, taking risks over nothing. Do you agree, or not?>

The Visser mulled over his comments for a few seconds. <Very well,> he said finally. <I agree. Tell me of the device.>

Ax told him.

We fled before the Visser could kill us all, worming our way back through now-deserted rooms, finding places to demorph or morph, blending in with the crowd.

We made sure the haunted house passengers were okay. We waited for the staff to find the unconscious Torreli and let his distressed, sobbing kid follow him into an ambulance. And then we went home.

I hadn't found time to actually fix the water trough, unfortunately.

My mom got home a couple of hours later. By then, I was in bed, pretending to sleep. I had mixed feeling about actually going to sleep. On the one hand, I really needed it. On the other, there was always the chance – the very good chance – that my rest would be plagued with nightmares. And I didn't want any nightmares involving toilets.

Yeerks could infest horses. Andalite artefacts from a Dome ship older than Ax's were on Earth. How could such a pointless mission be so, well, important?

There were pieces of the puzzle missing, big pieces; pieces that I didn't even know existed until I found them. I didn't want to go out and get my notes, not right then, but the most prominent questions swam in my mind. Why hadn't Elfangor morphed to heal at the construction site and fled? Why had he broken Seerow's Kindness for us? If yeerks could inhabit less intelligent species, why didn't they? How had the andalite toilet gotten to Earth, if it hadn't been from Elfangor and Ax's ship? If Visser Three had been ordered to run a secret invasion by his superiors, as Ax had claimed, who were those superiors? Why were the yeerks trying to conquer the galaxy? Why couldn't Visser Three seem to delegate? How little could I morph to still get the animal's instincts? Could I just do a brain? Would that work?

The questions bothered me, demanded attention in my mind. But if I answered them, it would lead to more questions, and even more if I answered those. It was a big universe, more full of life than I'd ever seriously considered before meeting Elfangor. And I'd just about gotten to grips with the fact that yes, aliens were real, and they were on Earth. One of them was even my friend. That didn't mean I could understand them. There was no guarantee that my human mind was capable of thinking in ways that could be used to understand them, or vice versa. But then, humans were strange enough. I lived in a world where the Air Force guarded a toilet in a secret base out near the souvenir shop of a woman called Crazy Helen. Although to be fair, it was an alien toilet.

It didn't matter. It was off-limits now, both to us and the yeerks. Could we trust the Visser to keep his promise? Probably. He mightn't be the most subtle or decent guy, but he was smart enough to carry out an invasion, so he was smart enough to realise that establishing an honest precedent would be a benefit in the long run. We'd probably have to negotiate again in the future, after all.

The universe was a big, complicated place. We humans barely scratched the surface of how even the most basic physics worked and here we were with aliens and interstellar war and us, us four human kids, one ex-human and one andalite cadet, trying to make sense of it. Trying to untangle what we needed to know and what we needed to do to protect the planet.

My name is Cassie. And I fight aliens. Sometimes, I have normal concerns to deal with – homework and injured horses and parents who are worried about me. Sometimes, I have decidedly less normal problems, like trying to figure out the limits of my shapeshifting healing factor, learning the sign language of telepathic alien centaurs, and stopping mind slugs from spreading their networks of slaves to encompass the guardians of a mystery toilet. Sometimes, it's hard to know what is normal and what isn't any more. Who's to say that homework is a more normal human activity than fighting aliens? History? Popularity?

We are where we are and we have what we have. And I might not have known all the details, had all the puzzle pieces. But I knew one thing – as strange, wonderful, confusing and ridiculous as what we had was, I would fight to protect it. I would keep fighting for it.

For the rest of my life if I had to.


End file.
